4 Disciplines to Improve the Execution of Your Goals
There are 4 basic disciplines that you can apply to improve the execution of goals at a personal and massive team level. In this article we will provide a brief overview of the concepts from the â4DXâ book.
Solid Foundation with Proven Results
The four disciplines of execution are based on many other books and concepts and provide a solid framework to executing at a personal and team level. They borrow concepts from several other successful methods and have been tested over many years.
1 Focus on The Wildly Important
You hear this over and over that you need to focus in order to be effective yet ambitious people always want to do more rather than less (I am very familiar with this).
Letâs take a silly simple example to make this obvious. Imagine you wanted to accomplish 4 things in the next hour like write a book, bake a cake, swim, and create a marketing campaign. Each of those items would take a lot more than an hour to complete, trying to complete them all in one hour would result in nothing being completed. This is obvious in this made up scenario because the things we want to complete take a long time and we canât do them all well at the same time, let alone 1 hour. When things get bigger and the time available is larger we loose track of this simple concept because its no longer so simple to see but it is still true.
Choose 1-2 Things to Focus On
Focusing on the wildly important says that you need to choose 1-2 things to focus on for a period of time. If you try to do more than that, none of those items will actually get accomplished.
So the first step is to pick 1-2 things that, if completed, would make a massive difference to getting results.
2 Act on the Lead Measures
Youâve likely measured your success before but did not know it. You measured how many birthdays youâve had (even though some would rather not as they get older ;-). Youâve measured how much money you have in your bank account, how much you weigh (if you are interested in your health), how many times you go to the gym. You get the idea.
When it comes to execution, itâs important to measure with numbers to know concretely and definitively how well you are doing. There are two categories of measurement identified in this approach.
Lag Measures for Goals
Lag Measures are the things that happen which are outside your direct control. For example, how many things you have sold. Whether people buy something you are selling is not in your direct control.
Lead Measures for Goals
These are the things you do, which you have direct control over, which hopefully result in good lag measures. For the example of selling, you may advertise the product, put out coupons, go on social media and post every week, and so forth.
Since you only have direct control over lead measures, that is what you want to focus on.
X To Y By When?
For this discipline it is recommended that you measure using a pattern of X to Y by when. For example, âIncrease weekly posting rate from 0 (starting now) to 4 per week by the end of Augustâ. Another example, increase sales calls from 2 per week now, to 10 per week by the end of Sept.
Similarly the lag measures can be stated in the same way. Increase sales from 10 items to 1000 items by end of November.
Lead Measures Influence Lag Measures
As you work on your lead activities, you can hopefully see an impact on the lag measures to get you towards you goals. In both cases you have a measurable goal and can chart to see how you are doing. If the lead activities are not making a difference on the lag measures, itâs time to adjust. Usually you would start by adjusting the lead activities/measures. If after many attempts you are still not getting lag results, itâs time to rethink.
3 Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
Above we discussed how we are planning to measure our progress using lag and lead measures. Now its important to have a score board so that we and our teams can see the results.
Think about the last time you or your kid played basketball, tennis, or other game and did not keep score. Sure it was fun but usually people kind of relax and take it easy. Then think about what happened when you started keeping score. Letâs say your kid had an actual basketball game against another team and the score board was visible to all. Youâve probably noticed that everyone was very focused, and really wanted to win.
Executing on Your Lead Measures
Time Blocking is critical to executing on the lead measures. Often people get distracted with urgent but not important things. Making time to do the lead measures helps with execution. A tool like the Yomez App can help you with this execution.
Design the Score Board Together
The same concept applies to having a score board. Measuring is important, but displaying the results in a fun way that the team can see is extremely motivating. Having the team design and build the score board is also very motivating and fun.
4 Create a Cadence of Accountability
Finally we want to have a regular cadence of accountability to coordinate how things are going, and adjust as needed.
If youâve ever done SCRUM or Agile youâve seen a modern approach to projects. In the old days, and maybe some times these days, people tried to plan every detail of long projects. They created these massive Gant charts that looked like a water fall because lines would be drawn from top tasks to bottom tasks. It would take forever to plan and if you wanted to change anything, forget it!
The SCRUM concept is a system where there is a list of things to do, called the backlog. People define a sprint (lets say its one week) and decide what they are going to accomplish during that week. Once the week starts, nothing is changed till the end of the week. At the end of the week the team looks back at what was completed, if anything has changed in the business that needs adjusting the plan, and then do another sprint.
The brilliance of this system
1 â Quick and easy to plan 1 week in detail.
2 â Since nothing changes during the week, the team can actually focus and make progress.
3 â When the week is over, the team can see how they did and adjust to dynamic business conditions quickly.
The cadence of accountability is the same as SCRUM. Each week the team decides what they are going to do (usually it has a direct impact on the lead measures). At the end of the week they review how they did and pick goals for the following week as needed. The accountability part is to make sure that people actually do the things they sign up to do for each sprint.
Scaling to Massive Teams â A Whole Company
The above system is fantastic for small and massive teams. For massive teams the goals are created for the whole company and then each team creates their own goals which support the company goals. It ends up looking like a tree where the roots is the company goal and the branches are team goals.
Learning More
If you want to learn more about the above, some suggested readings are â4DX â The Four Disciplines of Executionâ that contains the above system and discusses it in more detail. Another great book is âMeasure What Mattersâ which talks about OKRâs (Objective and Key Results) which are similar to the goals/measurements above and discusses how large companies such as Intel and Google amongst others have used these systems for years.
