Le quattro discipline dell'esecuzione

Forcing our mind to adopt a new habit is a very complex activity. In my previous article I presented strategies to ritualize behaviors and turn them into habits in order to optimize the resources needed for a high-focus work session.

Although now we are fully aware of what we need to put into practice to be more effective at work, we must focus on how.

The 4DX Method

In 2012 Chris McChesney, with the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, theorized four disciplines to help companies implement high-level strategies. Like many other methodologies, 4DX also provides suggestions in a very generic way, making it possible to adapt the rules to other areas, such as work methods. The method is extremely useful for understanding the gap between what is necessary and how to achieve it.

Discipline #1: focus on the wildly important

As the method itself suggests: “the more things you try to do, the less you will accomplish.” Execution should therefore be aimed at a small number of important goals. Keeping the target simple allows the company to focus its energy and employees to stay focused on the result to achieve.

Discipline #2: act on the lead measures

After identifying your important goals, you need to measure the results. There are two types of metrics for this purpose:

• Lag measures. These are the measures that describe the things you are trying to improve. Take for example the goal of improving customer satisfaction in a bakery. The lag measure will be the customer satisfaction score. This measure will arrive late, too late to be able to change the process in progress.
• Lead measures. These measures focus on the behaviors that will lead to success. To stay with the bakery example, you measure the number of free samples distributed. The amazing thing is that if the number of free samples increases, this will mean that customer satisfaction will also increase when it is measured.

Focusing on lead measures allows you to act on the behaviors that control the near future and will have a positive impact on long-term goals. That is why it is important to give weight to the number of hours spent in distraction-free work sessions, as they directly determine the quantity and quality of what will happen in the future.

Discipline #3: keep a scoreboard

People behave differently when they have to keep a score: they feel committed to the company, develop a healthy sense of competition, and strengthen their motivation. The scoreboard can be physical and part of the office furniture or virtual and managed through management software. Those familiar with Agile design will have no difficulty imagining a Kanboard dedicated, for example, to the hours spent working in a focused manner.

Discipline #4: create regular meetings

The final step to maintain focus on important goals is to create moments of meeting, at regular intervals, for mutual scoreboard analysis. In this phase, the processes that led to the current state are analyzed with a view to improving in the next meeting. The meetings may last only a few minutes, but it is precisely in these moments that everyone will realize that things are really happening! Once again, for those who have had the opportunity to work in an Agile way, these moments can be represented by sprint planning with the related retrospectives and planning for the next round.

References

[1] Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work. Piatkus.