Imagine your family, adult children, spouses and grandchildren have gathered at your home and the next day you will all leave for a very special vacation together. When you get up the next morning, you find a late-night storm has dropped a big tree limb onto the road from your home, blocking you in. The limb is too big to move on its own off the road. Your goal is to get on vacation so to get there you need to cut the limb in the middle, allowing you to then remove both halves to the side and open the road so everyone can leave for vacation. Your only tools are the two axes in your garage. You and your eldest son choose the best spot in middle and are ready to begin cutting. Just as the two of you begin swinging your axes, a daughter-in-law asks you to stop because she believes it’s important to cut off all the little limbs first and put them in a pile to the side. Then your youngest son walks up and says there is a better location to cut the tree to preserve more firewood. Out of the corner of your eye you notice your grandchildren have begun playing on the ends of the tree limb on either side of the road. How soon will you get the road cleared to leave for vacation? You may miss it for all the distractions. The only way to get the limb cut quickly is to not allow the distractions to get in the way, which means telling the family that all the effort must go to cutting the tree, and then moving the tree. I know, it means some in the family will be unhappy you aren’t using their idea, and you will even have to say “no” to your grandchildren (which is not easy), to focus on getting the limb cut. If you keep the focus on cutting the tree limb in half, you’ll soon be on vacation.
If only organizations understood how to block out the distractions and keep focused on the big thing. Yet I must admit, I’ve lost my focus by attacking a distraction many times in my career. When I look back, I realize very few were a real crisis that needed me. Often the distractions fed my ego. I wasn’t really needed as they would have solved themselves or someone else could have handled them. I couldn’t say “no” because fixing them made me feel needed and valued, which is the wrong reason to let yourself be distracted.
As part of my strategic planning work with organizations, I work to help them identify the “big thing” to focus on and not allow distractions. Here’s how.
Once we’ve visioned and set long-term goals, we don’t immediately jump to creating goals. Instead, we first spend time identifying the biggest problem holding back the organization from achieving the long-term goals they created. We generate a list of problems and talk about them. We begin a sifting process, constantly dropping problems out until we have agreement on the biggest problem. The criterion for the biggest problem is when it’s solved, many of those other problems from the list are easier to solve. The biggest problem becomes the big thing. In the story above, the long-term goal is family vacation together and the tree limb became the big thing, because until it was solved, they couldn’t go on vacation.
We next create a small number of annual goals, with a minor twist. We want the right goals, not the wrong ones. I’ve met leaders who’ve said, “we accomplished all our goals this past year” and when I say to them, “that’s great, how are things different?”, they can’t answer the question because it isn’t. Those were the wrong goals because things must be different when you accomplish a goal.
We won’t allow leaders to choose any goal that is not a step in solving the big problem holding the organization back. To do it, we insert a discipline, requiring anyone proposing a goal to explain how achieving the goal will help solve the big problem. We sift through the recommended goals until there are three or four that when accomplished will solve the big problem or make a big dent in it.
The next challenge is discipline in execution. Plans rarely fail because the ideas weren’t right, they usually fail because leadership lacked the discipline needed in execution. Leaders must be willing to say “no” to things that will distract and keep focusing time, energy and resources on the big thing. If you keep the big thing the big thing, you’ll have more success.
Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:13-14
