Day 26 on which I sing the praisies of "leading indicators"

According to the very excellent book 4 Disciplines of Execution, the primary reason that small businesses can’t reach big goals is that they plan to work on, monitor, and track the wrong things.

Let’s say, for instance, that you own a company that manufactures widgets (don't worry, this will, as always, wend its way back to health)

It’s generally accepted that widgets have very little price elasticity (except for iWidgets, which sell out months in advance at crazy prices to man-bunned hipster widget users around the world), and so the way to make more money is simply to make and sell more widgets.

Every January, you bring together the whole staff, have a company retreat, and get super-excited about doubling widget sales this year.

And every freaking year, December rolls around with little or no change in the widget sales numbers.

Sound familiar? Like, I don’t know, every New Year’s resolution, ever?

That’s because, much like WidgetCo, we place too much of our focus on the END goal, instead of tracking, reporting, and monitoring the “leading indicators” to that goal.

For instance: if you truly understand WidgetCo’s business model, you know that there are certain things that predict widget sales in any given week. One predictor might be cold calls by the sales staff to widget users; perhaps it’s a known performance indicator that every 20^th call results in an appointment and every 10^th appointment results in a sale, and every sale averages 10,000 widgets.

So if your goal is to sell an extra million widgets this year, your focus shouldn’t be on the December 31 numbers. It should be on hiring enough new sales staff—or properly motivating the existing staff—to make 77 additional cold calls each day. Because 77 daily cold calls = 385 per (5 day) week = 20,000 extra per year. And 20,000 additional cold calls = 1,000 extra appointments = 100 extra sales of 10,000 widgets each, or 1,000,000 extra sales, more or less like magic.

If the leading indicator—the cold calls—is the PRIMARY focus, and it’s clear to the sales people that they should do whatever it takes to hit that number each week, and that they’ll need to report weekly on whether they did that or not, chances are that the million widget goal will be reached.

The practical problems are twofold: first, the focus on the leading indicators tends to get lost in the whirlwind of the day-to-day activities that are already part of WidgetCo’s culture. The calls don’t get made because there was already the paperwork to file, and the reports to write, and the meetings to attend, and the floors to sweep, and, and, and. The other problem is that WidgetCo may not be prepared for the OTHER changes that a million additional widget orders might force: every 20^th cold call means that someone has to be out of the office for an extra appointment, and every 200^th means that there’s another invoice for the bookkeeping department to process and another 10,000 widgets for the line to produce, and another skid of product for shipping to pack and get out…

So if WidgetCo isn’t prepared to create an environment where:

1.       The leading indicators are done first, and some things are left undone because hitting those daily and weekly numbers is the most important thing

2.       There is constant reporting and accountability by the people responsible for hitting those numbers, to make sure that they’re not getting lost in the whirlwind

3.       There are contingency plans to grow the parts of the organization that support the big goal as necessary

The goal just won’t happen.

It’s my belief that one of the major errors I’ve made in the past in regards to my health has been along similar lines.

I set a goal for something—weight, strength, focus, whatever.

That goal CAN’T be reached for weeks or months.

I might set interim goals (I want to be able to bench press 150 pounds by 12/31, so I should be able to do 75 pounds by 6/30)(not a real goal, I couldn’t care less how much I can bench press), but those are just more targets, NOT leading indicators to whether I’ll hit them.

And the problem is, if all I can see is wanting to have x, when x is still a long way away, it’s far too easy to give up, or to decide I’ll start on that next week, because if it’s going to take 52 weeks who cares if it takes 53 or 59 or 75? And really, until x is achieved, I haven’t succeeded at all, have I? if one is prone to negativity, it could be said that until the moment that goal is reached, I’m failing every single day.

If, on the other hand, I focus only on what I can control RIGHT NOW, and if the measure of success isn’t what happens 6 months from now but whether I did what I was supposed to do TODAY, and assuming that those things are highly likely to cause me to reach that long term goals if they’re done repeatedly and consistently, I can feel like I’m succeeding every day. Or, if I don’t actually hit my leading indicators for that particular day (as I didn’t today, when after 7 hours on my feet and a 5 hour drive, I failed to work out for an hour), I can still succeed TOMORROW.

That’s why I created my daily reporting chart of all of the leading indicators that I think will lead me where I want to go in my #100DaysofHealth. It lets me know what I need to do every day. It lets me see how I did. It lets me have a “win” every day, not just a big one (or a big loss) at day 100.

I can tell you that it’s working a LOT better than the old strategy. Yes, I still get discouraged that I’m not, after 26 days, already completely healthy and focused and strong. But that discouragement lasts a few seconds, and it isn’t strong enough to cause me to do something that will make me not able to check the boxes tonight. Bringing my focus BACK to the real, real goal of just acting like a healthy person every day, which is my leading indicator, means I can succeed daily, instead of just once.