Sound impossible? “Stretch” goals aim to achieve breakthrough results and always seem impossible at the time you set them. If they seemed reasonable, they would not qualify as stretch or breakthrough goals.

A stretch goal is an ambitious goal that you don’t know how to reach. It is something you have not done before and that you do not know how you are going to achieve. It forces you to discard comfortable solutions and adopt new solutions. A stretch goal communicates that maintaining the status quo is not an option—it cannot be met by tweaking the existing system.

By reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible. —Jack Welch

The power of stretch goals is that they require everyone in the organization to reorient themselves and their thinking. They force you to work backward from the goals you have set to think about just what you would have to do to achieve them. You simply can’t do things the way you did before.

So what is a stretch goal? The classic example is President Kennedy’s 1962 announcement that the U.S. would “put a man on the moon by the end of this decade and return him safely to the Earth.” We had no idea how we were going to do it. We had not built a space capsule that would make this trip. We didn’t have a rocket big enough to take it into orbit, let alone send it to the moon. Only the more courageous among us can match the stretch goals of NASA’s Apollo mission.

Moving Beyond. General Electric Co. was one of the first organizations to institutionalize the idea of stretch goals. According to former GE chairman and chief executive officer Jack Welch, stretch means moving beyond being as good as you have to be to being as good as you possibly can be—setting impossible goals and going after them.

“If you do know how to get there, it’s not a stretch target,” Welch has said. “We have found that by reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible; and even when we don’t quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done.”

Another leader who set stretch goals is former Alcoa Inc. chairman and CEO Paul O’Neill, who served as secretary of the Treasury Department early in President George W. Bush’s first term. At Treasury, O’Neill found operations and product-making organizations that he was sure were operating at 30 percent of what was theoretically possible. For example, the department took five months to close its financial books. Yet Alcoa, with 350 locations in 36 countries, took only 21¼2 days to close its books.

So O’Neill established an aggressive goal for Treasury: By June 1 of the next year, the agency would close its books in three days. At the same time, he set about creating the conditions where everyone in the organization felt they were part of the effort and had a sense of being part of the leadership.

As it turned out, O’Neill left before the deadline, and the department didn’t meet his three-day goal. But setting the stretch goal had an impact: Treasury closed its books in eight days shortly thereafter.

Treasury is not the only example of an agency establishing stretch goals. Following the enactment of the Govern-ment Performance and Results Act in 1993, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration set a stretch goal of raising seat belt use to 85 percent by 2000 from 67 percent in 1997.

NHTSA officials chose that goal because evidence suggested that increased seat belt use significantly reduces fatalities and accident severity. Although NHTSA did not achieve nationwide 80 percent seat belt use until fiscal 2005, it still made substantial progress by setting a stretch goal.

Traditional methods of improving business processes, such as total quality management and continuous improvement, are effective for obtaining gradual, incremental improvement. Today, however, we face unprecedented challenges and increasingly complex demands.

War, terrorism, bird flu and hurricanes are challenging government performance like never before. Departments and agencies must develop new strategies and business models to break ground in serving the public and make a difference in the lives of individuals. They must find more new ways to streamline service delivery, increase efficiency and effectiveness, and bolster security.

Too often, leaders prefer to choose reasonable goals they are confident they can achieve—missing the opportunity to set aggressive stretch goals that demand organizational breakthroughs. The vitality of our nation and government depends on leaders’ ability to embrace innovation. Safe goals may no longer be sufficient in the face of 21st century demands.

Jonathan D. Breul is a partner at IBM Global Business Services and senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government in Washington. He also was senior adviser to the deputy director for management in the Office of Management and Budget.