Punctuated Equilibrium

I’m pleased to begin shar­ing con­tent with you from my asso­ciates and oth­er guest experts. Here is the first from my asso­ciate advi­sor Dean Ritchey:

Con­sis­tent Short-Term Effort = Long-Term Success

I work with numer­ous lead­er­ship teams to help them estab­lish their quar­ter­ly and annu­al goals. The con­ver­sa­tions are robust, inter­est­ing and always land on goals that move the busi­ness for­ward. They are always writ­ten with the ​“SMART” frame­work — Spe­cif­ic, Mea­sur­able, Real­is­tic, Attain­able and Time­bound — so we tru­ly under­stand what the fin­ish line looks like. And, as a team, every­one under­stands their account­abil­i­ty to sup­port the attain­ment of these goal.

So why do these tal­ent­ed teams some­times miss the mark in achiev­ing the goals?

The gap that I see, form­ing between aver­age com­ple­tion rate and top quar­tile com­ple­tion rate, lives with­in the short-term habits.

Over the years, I’ve con­tin­u­al­ly observed the behav­iour of ​“punc­tu­at­ed equi­lib­ri­um” unfold — the phe­nom­e­non where indi­vid­u­als delay the start of the project until halfway to the end date. It’s proven that indi­vid­u­als don’t real­ize a sense of urgency until the mid­way point, which typ­i­cal­ly coin­cides with a spike in inter­est from the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers, who then start ask­ing for progress updates.

So how do we com­bat the ten­den­cy to delay our efforts towards goal attainment?

Week­ly Milestones

Since these are the most impor­tant goals to move the busi­ness ahead, it makes sense to dis­cuss our progress week­ly. So, we ask all our clients to devel­op very clear, week­ly mile­stones that are report­ed on dur­ing their week­ly team hud­dles. The teams review these week­ly mile­stones with the intent to under­stand the cur­rent sta­tus and iden­ti­fy the obsta­cles pre­vent­ing the mile­stones from being achieved.

This process pro­vides the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cel­e­brate mile­stone com­ple­tions and, most impor­tant­ly, it dri­ves week­ly spikes in effort. If your quar­ter­ly goal requires 12 weeks to com­plete, the typ­i­cal punc­tu­at­ed equi­lib­ri­um point would be six weeks into the project, but by cre­at­ing week­ly mile­stones, the aver­age inflec­tion point is three to four days.

Our clients with sol­id per­for­mance in estab­lish­ing and review­ing week­ly mile­stones pro­vide us with feed­back that this process actu­al­ly speeds up dis­cus­sions. They’ve learned that when mile­stones are hit, very lit­tle con­ver­sa­tion needs to take place as the over­all goal is on track. It’s when we lack a detailed mech­a­nism for track­ing our per­for­mance that the con­ver­sa­tions length­en and lack clarity.

Ulti­mate­ly, devel­op­ing a strat­e­gy for the health of your busi­ness is incred­i­bly impor­tant for dri­ving orga­ni­za­tion­al align­ment, but it is the abil­i­ty to exe­cute that strat­e­gy, with a sense of con­sis­ten­cy, that leads to long-term success.

I would offer that long-term suc­cess is a direct prod­uct of con­sis­tent short-term effort.

The Chal­lenge:

1. Take your cur­rent top five quar­ter­ly goals and ensure that, for the remain­der of the quar­ter, you have at least one week­ly deliv­er­able for each one
2. Assign indi­vid­u­als to report per­for­mance against that mile­stone weekly.