Three Distractions That Defeat A Good Plan
The Zone, Body For Life, Atkins, South Beach, and Vegan are all different eating plans I have employed to lose weight. They all worked too. That is, they worked as long as I executed the plan!
I’ve spent many hours in conference rooms developing business plans. Some companies will take three months out of 2014 to plan for 2015. Very few businesses or business people ignore planning.
But, some businesses thrive and some just survive. Was it truly a better strategy that made the difference or just better execution?
Most Plans Work. It’s The Execution
Frequently in business, after a long and intensive strategy development process, the plans that are accompanied with excitement and begun with vigor in January are barely remembered in June.
What happens? We get distracted.
Three Distractions That Defeat A Good Plan
1. The Whirlwind
Sean Covey, Stephen Covey’s son, in his book The Four Disciplines of Execution describes the Whirlwind as our day job. It is the urgent things at work that will always be there: Email, meetings, phone calls, reports, personnel issues etc.
The daily urgent items in the Whirlwind often choke out the important strategies that are laid out in the planning process. The Whirlwind is necessary and keeps the doors of businesses open.
However, the Whirlwind should only take up 80% of our capacity. It takes discipline for an organization or an individual to keep the Whirlwind at bay. But it is vital to maintaining the focus on what we have identified as the truly important.
2. Too Many Priorities
Too many priorities are a distraction that prevents us from accomplishing anything with excellence. We cannot focus through diffusion of efforts. When we realize the day-to-day Whirlwind takes 80% of our capacity, we must be very careful how many strategies we call a priority.
Covey also points out that most organizations and individuals have too many priorities. He quotes a study that proves that having a lot of priorities does improve productivity. It hinders it.
The results show that as the number of priorities/goals goes up, the number that are accomplished actually goes down! Productivity drops!
Number of Goals Goals Achieved with Excellence
2-3 2-3
4-10 1-2
11-20 0
The bottom line of this study proves that if everything is a priority then nothing is. We must as organizations and as individuals be ruthless in separating the good goals and the best goals. If it does not rank #1 or #2 then it should not be a priority.
3. Measuring The Wrong Things
If we develop a strategy and never lay out the behaviors needed to accomplish that strategy, then we should expect mediocrity. There may be a lot of things that go into executing a strategy, but what should be measured?
Many companies measure the wrong things. They create metrics and believe that measurement will insure success. I do believe in measuring what you expect. But be careful what you measure.
Covey points out that the things measured should be predictive and controllable activities that can me measured without a lag in time.
- If I do this daily/weekly activity extremely well, can I predict the success of my long-term strategy?
- Is this item in my control or is it dependent on other people or factors that I have no control over?
If we set up measurements that are not highly predictive or not in our direct control, the measurements themselves become a distraction to execution.
The Bottom Line:
Every diet works just like everyone has a plan. Average plans executed with excellence will always beat grandiose strategies that fade away in six months.
The individuals and the teams that do the best job of keeping the Whirlwind at arm’s length, maintaining a realistic number of priorities and measuring the right things will be the winners in the coming year.
Very few people believe planning is not important. I believe in the old saying:
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
But, we cannot let ourselves or our teams believe that a great plan is the key to big success. The teams that execute their plans will be the ones who win!.
I think the next diet I try will be the Paleo diet. It will not be the diet that makes the difference. It will be my ability to avoid the distractions that will come along in the process.
Question:
How many goals do you, your team or your family have for this year? What distractions do you need to conquer to achieve them?
Why do some businesses thrive and some just survive?
This is an important—and interesting—question which I have been addressing for some years.
The solutions cited in the article don’t really cut the mustard. Firstly, they are traits which need to be characteristic of most of the people in an organisation for the organisation to be considered as suffering from them corporately. Not impossible, by any means, but unlikely to be the case in all of the large number of businesses that are failing to thrive.
Secondly, they are all behavioural problems. They may be problems but they aren’t _the_ problem, they’re symptoms.
The explanations of failure to thrive lie in psychology and emotional intelligence.
It is the way that the people in a business relate to each other and, in particular, the way that the bosses relate to the others that is the primary area to investigate. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, businesses are ultimately just the people in them and, in fact, you could say that a business is just the _relationships_ between the people in it, and between them and those in all the stakeholder organisations.
Businesses which grow and succeed are those in which the relationships are positive, facilitating and constructive. Essentially, the people in charge are, to a great of lesser extent, showing leadership qualities.
Businesses which fail to thrive (and, of course, it is a continuum not an ‘either/or’) are those in which there is less leadership resulting in less good, and/or fewer, positive, facilitating and constructive relationships. Everything is just much harder, so less gets accomplished.
Now, it is in the nature of teams with bosses that the people in the team take their cue from their boss (leaders or not). So, if we want to look for a cause of a struggling business, it is best to look first at the boss(es).
Time and time again I encounter businesses (either personally or in the media) in which, at the end of the day, it boils down to: the business is stuck because the boss is stuck. If the boss is able to get unstuck, the business is likely to get unstuck (without anybody doing anything else) unless someone else is stuck.
However, part of the boss’s stuckness often shows up in unhelpful ways, such as “it’s not me, they’re the ones that underperforming…”, “..and I am right about that”, “it may be partly my fault but it’s because I’m doing this whirlwind thing” (ie, deliberately looking in the wrong place for the answer). But mostly, it’s plain old ‘fear of the next step’.
Please see the (true) case study on this page for a perfect example of this: http://www.emotionalintelligenceatwork.com/resources/on-being-stuck.
Jeremy,
I can not argue with a single point you make. It ultimately comes back to the leadership and the culture developed by that leadership. What I endeavored to do was provide a fresh look at some tools that can be used in planning and executing.
I always say that good tools put in the hands of the wrong person (lacking EI or lacking in character) is manipulation not leadership. Just because I hand someone a hammer does not make them a carpenter!
Your statements hit points I make frequently in working with clients and in past blogs and future ones as well. This article was intended to share some tools that the leaders we all desire to have and to be, can utilize.