The 8020Info Water Cooler
Highlights and insights for strategists of all types
#402 – Feb. 20, 2025 [6 Minute Read]
Acting on Strategy: Getting Things Done
This month we’ve noticed strategy-makers are focusing on getting things done! Here are some insights, frameworks and tools to help you achieve greater success with your strategies …
Quick Takes:
Four Disciplines for Executing Strategy:
This year many of our clients have found it useful to focus on approaches outlined in Franklin Covey’s formula called The 4 Disciplines of Execution. They advise us to:
- Narrow the Focus: Start by selecting one (or, at the most, two) extremely important goals — the wildly Important. Focus on less so your team can achieve more.
- Find Points of Leverage: Next, look at what few vital activities will drive success in achieving that goal. “The battles you choose must win the war.” They must ensure success.
- Engage with a Scoreboard: Track activities carefully with a compelling scoreboard. Success depends on emotional engagement, and you need a “player’s scoreboard” that allows your team to know instantly whether they’re winning or losing.
- Keep a “Cadence of Accountability”: Unless we consistently hold each other accountable, a goal naturally disintegrates in the whirlwind of day-to-day busy-ness. A rhythm of regular, short and frequent meetings will help team members hold each other accountable for producing results.
Eight Ways to Kill Procrastination:
On LinkedIn, entrepreneur Scott Caputo shared some great tips to help you avoid putting things off for another day. He notes that procrastination is a habit, not a character trait. “Change the system, change the behavior,” he says.
All eight tips are helpful. They include resetting your physical environment, breaking big tasks into small steps, locking in social accountability, scheduling demanding tasks for your peak energy hours, and setting up painful consequences if you delay.
Our own favourite was the Five-Minute Start: Begin whatever task, but for just five minutes. Remove the pressure of completion. Build momentum through tiny actions.
The Art of Calling Out Room Dynamics
On the blog Leadership Garden, Csaba Okrona relates to the common experience of being in a painful meeting that goes off the rails, when everyone can feel tensions rising.
Here’s his list of common problem behaviours that emerge in pressure-cooker meetings: • laundry lists of grievances • selective hearing • escalating frustration • assumptions running wild • amplification of emotions • unproductive circular arguments, and • resolution by exhaustion.
He recommends stating the obvious, whether that’s noting the sense of frustration in the room or that the conversation has strayed from problem-solving into defending positions. It has the effect of hitting a “pause” button, interrupting the pattern and setting up a reset.
Drill Down:
How to Improve Your Forecasting
It is a complex thing to anticipate the future, especially in these uncertain times, but Paul Saffo shared some helpful advice a few years ago in the Harvard Business Review. Here are his Six Rules For Effective Forecasting.
- Define a Cone of Uncertainty: Identify the range of potential events, knowing that possibilities will get broader over time. This “cone” is narrow in the near, more predictable future, and gets broader and more uncertain over longer time horizons.
- Find Yourself on the S curve: Change rarely unfolds in a straight line. Often mapped as an S-curve shape, change usually starts slowly and incrementally, then suddenly ramps up or explodes, and eventually tapers out or even drops off.
- Embrace the things that don’t fit: We tend to ignore indicators that don’t fit our existing mental picture, but anything truly new won’t show up in familiar categories.
- Hold strong opinions weakly: Decision-makers often place too much priority on a single piece of strong information that confirms their current line of thinking. Be prepared to reconsider or discard them the moment you encounter conflicting evidence.
- Look back twice as far as you look forward: Recent history rarely repeats itself directly — look further back for parallels and/or signals of a change curve.
- Know when not to make a forecast: Remember there are moments of chaos when forecasting is impossible. Even intense change will eventually settle down, though, so in these cases defer your forecast for a while.
No forecast can be absolutely certain — your task is to identify the full range of possibilities you’re facing and map the uncertainties so your planning will be effective rather than precisely accurate.
For Your Reading List:
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between. Several clients have mentioned digging into this catalogue of errors in judgement and decision-making. To succeed, you need to understand your odds, plan slow and act fast, start with the goal and then find the steps, build big from the small, be a team maker, master the “unknown unknowns”, and know that your biggest risk is you.
Closing Thought:
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” — Confucius
Vol. 25, No. 2 — Copyright 8020Info Inc. 2025