“How Aren’t You Doing?”

How aren’t you doing? That’s right, how are you at what you’re not doing? Have you ever been asked that question? I hope so! How well do we choose what to do and what to measure?

The answers to the questions tell much about how we think about work, prioritize and, most importantly, focus. Are we conditioned by our business systems and rewards for accomplishment such that we spend much of our time discussing, measuring, and reporting what was accomplished and done well, that is, what we are doing that we should have done. Could we perhaps be in the grips of the “more is better” paradigm? More is better has many dangerous consequences, across many dimensions, including the lethal supersizing of fast foods. More is better leads to business execution and reporting obesity. Business obesity is a big killer.

When putting together the yearly set of goals and objectives, do we develop a list of three or four that are truly critical to business? Or are we more likely to “brainstorm” a list of thirteen or fourteen? Upon review of our list, how many were really big deal items? How many were in the bag already? How many were anxieties driven, perhaps, to push off a nagging issue into the next cycle? When submitting the long list of items, are we confident that we’ve made great choices and we have a means to always do the critical first and the trivial last?

How do we decide what to measure? When reviewing our performance data, how much of it reports what got done? How much reports what did not get done? How should we spend our leadership and management time when reviewing performance data? Do we spend our time on what is going well or what is not? By the way, how much do we consume in resources measuring, compiling, reporting and reviewing all the data around what is OK?  Are we generating noise that masks the signals we want to hear?

We may be doing and measuring too much and far too little at the same time. Yep, we may be creating an overabundance of activity and data that hides the real scarcity of attention on the critical to success.

• First, does our planning have a bias towards “covering our parts” with enough objectives so that we are not criticized for overlooking something? Does that lead us to put the trivial many on equal footing with the significant few? Does that lead to resource and funding obesity? Does that make prioritization more difficult, complex, and political? Hmmm?
• Does measuring the positive obscure or blur out the dangerous negatives? Where do we want our attention? Do we want it on what is supposed to happen and is happening? Why? Would we better served on focusing on what was supposed to happen and didn’t and what was not supposed to happen and did?

Say we’re investing time and money with our physician for yearly physicals and quarterly check-ups.

• Lots of important stuff gets measured for the yearly “planning and strategy” session around achieving our strategy, the one about healthy and lengthy living. What do we want out of the session? What do we want to know and what do we expect from the physician in terms of action items for the coming year? Do we want a plan with fourteen objectives, or four?
• During the quarterly sessions, how much attention do we want on the items that doing well and how much on the stuff that may be killing us? What do we want our physician to talk about during our limited time together?
• How is practicing focus, discipline and follow-through with our personal health different than practicing them for our enterprises?  

So, how aren’t you doing today?