4 Disciplines of Execution and how it‘ll help you achieve your goals
Runaway from the many goals and focus on what matters. 4DX brings you How you’ll end up making it happen.
It’s Monday, you start your week full of energy to execute all the amazing projects that you are planning for quite a while. Everything is moving well, you’re being able to do the first “Checks” in your ToDo list, but suddenly your agenda starts to change a little bit.
It’s an urgent phone call you have to answer, a client wanting to talk to personally, a document that requires your revision, a manager that wants to have an O2O….
You blink and it’s Friday at 06 pm. Your week passed and you weren’t able to execute half of the projects you wanted to.
Probably you lived a week or even a whole semester which you had to put aside important projects to firefighting.
This is because, as Oliver Burkeman explains in his article for The Guardian, “When urgency rears its head, we become even less rational than Dwight Eisenhower knew”. Meaning, we always tend to solve the urgent than the important, “even if there’s no reason to do it other than that someone’s persuaded you it’s “urgent”.
This situation is very well explained with the metaphor or the Whirlwind and Goals.
Whirlwind v.s. Goals
In the book 4 Disciplines of Execution: Getting Strategy Done, Chris McChesney, and Jim Huling bring explain both of them as activities/jobs/task which we have to deal in our daily basis.
Goals are the new activities that we aim to execute. They are important and we have to act on it, have the necessary commitment to ensure its execution since they affect future success.
However, execute the Goals is not an easy job when you face the real enemy of execution, the Whirlwind. To keep our daily job it requires a massive amount of energy and time, and what ends up happening is that we finish our day without time to execute our goals, the new activities.
Whirlwind is the existing work we have, it’s urgent, we have to solve it. It acts on you, simply appear on our table and you have to solve it.
Goals are the new activities, they are important for future success and we know this. Although you act on it, you have to initiate it.
You may notice which is each one in your routine, and I believe that you want to achieve your goals in the midst of your whirlwind. But let me ask you something: What are your goals?
The Importance of Clear Goals
Even this can look like the most basic thing for you, the whole concept of 4DX is based on: Managers and workers don’t know their goal, or what they should achieve. Check it with your team, do everyone knows what are the goals you’re working to achieve?
They don’t know or because they don’t keep a score or because they are not accountable at all, either because there are too many and becoming or confused, or because of the lack of routine itself.
One great example the book brings is that in teams where the number of goals, aside from the normal daily activities that emerge (whirlwind), is above 11, the number of goals achieved with excellence is 0.
So based on it, the book suggests to: “Establish a clear line of sight to your Wildly Important Goals.”.
It’s knowing that you have to manage your whirlwind that the 4DX was designed. They are rules for executing your most critical strategy among your whirlwind.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution
The framework came after many research, trial, and error. They interview at the beginning “thirteen thousand people internationally across seventeen different industry groups and completed internal assessments with five hundred different companies.”
At first glance they can look to basic and simplistic, however, it might change completely the way how you approach your goals with your team.
1. Focus on the Wildly Important
If everything continues as it is, what are your most important goals, where should you focus 100%? It’s fundamental to have a maximum of 2~3 goals, and allocate your time, energy and focus towards its achievement.
The Wildly Important Goals, referred to as WIGs, have a structure of “From X to Y, by When”, where you make clear the current and desire state and your deadline for it. One example: From 1000 Contracts Signed to 1500 Contracts Signed by 31st December 202N.
“There will always be more good ideas than there is capacity to execute”
All of those have to be clear, and if you’re starting to track this measure now without know what your X would be, simply put 0.
Based on my experience I recommend a few questions for you to test if your WIG is really a WIG:
- Is the Team Aligned to the Overall WIG? Will everyone work daily to ensure this WIG achievement? If so, pass!
- Is it in the Structure? Is it in the format of From X to Y by When? If so, move!
- Is it Simple? Can everyone, in all the levels of this organization understand this? If so, yes!
- Does it focus on What, not How? Remember, the WIG is the Goal, leave the How for the Strategies.
2. Act on the Lead Measures
Pareto principle already says, Twenty percent of activities produce eighty percent of results. Focus on the highest leverage actions or activities that can accomplish goals.
The understanding is simple. Goals are your Lag Measures, it only tells you if you’ve achieved it or not. Taking the example I used before, Contracts Signed is a Lag Measure. If I tell you we had 1550 Contracts Signed you can conclude that we overachieved the WIG.
Twenty percent of activities produce eighty percent of results.
On the other hand, a Lead Measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal or not. When you’re looking to the lag measure is hard to do anything about it, but a lead measure is more under your control.
Taking the same example, if my lag measure is the #Contract Signed, I could set as lead measures the %Call-Meeting, %Meeting-Proposal Sent, Process Time Proposal Sent to Proposal Signed. All these three previous KPIs indicate to me if I’ll achieve my final goal or not, and are measures that I can influence on a daily basis.
3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
The third discipline is about to know how you’re doing in the middle of the game. Imagine a football game, knowing if you’re winning or losing change completely how you’ll behave during the game.
As the book says: “The difference in performance between a team that simply understands their lead and lag measures as a concept, and a team that actually knows their score, is remarkable.”
How to make it? Build a scoreboard wherein up to 5 seconds you can simply identify if you are winning or losing. The right kind of dashboard motivates your team to win.
But attention, understand the difference between the Coach Scoreboard and a Player Scoreboard. The coach one is complex and full of data, giving the best information to help the coach guide his team.
A Player Scoreboard has few characteristics.
- It’s simple;
- It’s visible for everyone in the team;
- It shows both, lead and lag measures;
- After seeing it, you can tell within five seconds if you’re winning or losing.
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability
Last but not least, build a culture of accountability that seeks for the achievement of the WIG with the right next steps. It means that the team will make personal commitments to everyone else to move the score forward.
To implement it, you should have a WIG Session at least weekly on the same day and time. The focus must be your WIGs, meaning that whirlwind is not allowed in the meeting.
The structure consists of 3 main blocks:
- Account: Report on commitments. Each member presents what they did.
- Review the Scoreboard: Learn from success and failures.
- Plan: Clear the path and make new commitments;
And to prepare for the meeting, the team members must answer: “What are the one or two most important things I can do this week to impact the lead measures?”. The answer to it must become their next commitments.
A big summary would be: highlight successes, analyze failures and bring the necessary corrections following the WIG Session structure.
Implementing
Implementing the whole framework may not be easy. The book has an entire section dedicated to explaining how to do it. However, based on my experience everything depends on its base, Discipline.
I’ll detail how was my experience with it was later on, anyway I can ensure to you that implementing 4DX can completely change the game. If you believe that it makes sense to you, follow these tips.
- Prepare yourself: When you decide to insert a completely new framework within your team routine, people need to look at you and trust in your capabilities to implement it. If they look at you and feel that you’re lost, they will doubt your decision.
- Be the Role Model: The whole framework is based on discipline, be the role model. I’m not telling you to be perfect, but if you want to see your team following all the disciplines, be the first one to follow it.
- Don’t Get Stuck to It: The framework is amazing, and start following as you should. However, if you feel that you have to adapt for some reason. Do it! No one understands better your team than you.
If implementing 4 Disciplines of Execution will make you achieve your goals I can not promise, but I can promise that it will help you.
Do have any experience with 4DX? Is your first time reading about it?
Share it in the comments below.
