Pop quiz: What’s the difference between a goal and an outcome? Between your mission statement and your north star? Between OKRs (objectives and key results) and KPIs (key performance indicators)?

If these terms make your head spin, don’t worry. They’re often used in frameworks designed to help teams plan and set strategy. But we can get tripped up by the technical jargon. We risk talking past one another if we’re using different frameworks, or even worse, excluding critical voices from the conversation.

So let’s set the jargon aside for a moment. Those terms are all different ways of asking: What are we trying to achieve? For that question, the words we use matter less than how we go about answering it.

Setting course is easier together

Sometimes the answer seems obvious. In an electoral campaign, you’re trying to win on election day. That clarity guides planning and motivates joint action, regardless of whether you call it your “goal” or something else. However, you might have further goals, like vote counts in certain districts or forging a coalition through the campaign.

In other contexts, setting goals is harder. Suppose you’re building a network of schools or supporting local artists. How do you balance scale with service quality? Where do financial sustainability and revenue fit in, and do they sit in tension with providing equitable services for marginalized communities? Research and data might inform your choices, but these aren’t empirical questions with universal answers.

The question of what you’re trying to achieve can only be answered in the context where it’s being asked, by the group asking it. It’s a question of what your particular group values and what change you want to see. The only answer to this question is a group answer.

Here are two principles to help your organization find its answer:

Principle 1: Shared identity leads to ambitious goals

Newly formed groups often have limited shared identity. They don’t see one another as part of the same group with a shared future, and so no one dreams big about what that future could be. If they have a shared vision at all, it’s the lowest common denominator.

Building a strong shared identity means building on the initial commonality that brought the members together. Maybe the group is just a loose-knit set of co-workers, neighbors on the same block, fans of the same music, or even survivors of a shared trauma. If some activity or outside force makes that commonality more salient for group members and they come to associate it with the group, the sense of shared identity grows. They start to identify with the group and see how their destinies are connected. Then they start to envision a better, more ambitious future together.

Social movements provide some of the strongest cases of shared identities leading to ambitious goals. For example, “me too.” movement founder Tarana Burke has noted how the movement “created visibility and community for those of us who thought we might go to our grave bearing a shame that was never ours to carry in the first place.” The emergence of the hashtag #MeToo in 2017 made that shared identity more relevant and visible for millions of people, while also forcing others, especially cis men, to choose between an identity as an ally or opposer. The resulting movement works toward a world free of sexual violence—a low bar in a moral sense, but a highly ambitious goal given our society’s entrenched structural misogyny.

Principle 2: Shared ownership makes ambitious goals realistic

Can a goal be too ambitious? There’s a risk that a group with a shared identity succumbs to groupthink and sets an unachievable goal. That’s where shared ownership matters, in two ways. First, by bringing more people into the work, shared ownership expands the realm of what’s possible: more people can do more. Second, if you’re the ones working to achieve that ambition, you have an incentive to keep the goal within the realm of what’s realistic.

That said, shared ownership is harder than it looks. It’s not just a matter of getting people to “buy in” to your idea. You have to build shared ownership through investment: getting a group to put time and effort into creating and developing an idea together and imagining their own role in advancing it.

This is one area where mass movements can struggle due to scale. Cooperatives and unions often have stronger possibilities for shared ownership. Professional networks and collaborations also provide good cases. Consider NewsMatch, a collaborative effort to fund independent nonprofit journalism. It combines a matching-gift model with tools and training to support fundraising by news organizations, alongside public awareness campaigns. Since 2016, the platform has helped more than 300 newsrooms raise over $270 million—including $230 million from individual donors. They’re able to do it because every participating news organization, foundation, and small donor invests in the shared goal of “ensuring every community has reliable news.” It’s ambitious, given the financial headwinds facing media and the political polarization of news, but achievable with enough partners sharing ownership.

Bringing the principles together

That we should be ambitious yet realistic is boilerplate goal-setting advice. These principles show up implicitly in organizational strategies. For example, nonprofits often match a vision statement with a mission statement: The vision is the world we want to create (the ambition), while the mission is our role in creating that world (our ownership over it). But neither is worth much unless they’re shared.

How you create shared identity and shared ownership depends on your starting point. A new mutual aid group formed in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic may have started with a low level of shared identity but clearer shared ownership of the mutual aid effort, as it was their whole reason for coming together. By contrast, an existing community group that pivoted to providing mutual aid may have had a higher level of shared identity but less clear ownership of the mutual aid effort, because they’re also doing other work in the community.

Once a group builds a shared identity and ownership, it is better placed to navigate conflicts and find creative solutions to challenges around equity, scale, quality, and sustainability. They’re better able to have difficult discussions when needed and to clarify what really matters to them. Collective goal setting can be a critical motivator and organizing principle.

Does this mean that all goal setting needs to be completely collaborative and participatory? Maybe not. There’s still a role for “visionary leaders” who see the potential and, by investing in others’ ownership, inspire them to achieve it. But there’s a real risk of overestimating the importance of prominent leaders. If the leader is the only one who clearly sees where the group is going, then others won’t be able to do as much to advance the cause. Groups that write their own stories—where they’re collectively the protagonist—can go farther than ones playing a role in someone else’s narrative.

Dave Algoso is a social change strategist, facilitator, advisor, and researcher.