Book of the Month: The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling

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We’ve reached a point in the calendar where many New Year’s resolutions have come to die. If you’ve made a resolution, set out to accomplish an annual goal, or are working toward a habit change in your personal life or business, you may be entering a plateau period where the initial motivation is starting to fade.

Maybe you’ve missed a few days recently or aren’t seeing the results just yet. Or perhaps you haven’t committed to the plan or given your existing actions enough time to compound. Too often the dependence on grit and patience alone leads to our goal’s demise.

If you want to get serious about your goals, process will outlast motivation any day. But how do we make sure our process puts us on the right path toward attaining our goal?

The 4 Disciplines of Execution provides a roadmap for focus and accountability, so any individual or group can achieve the results they set out to reach. The authors, Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling, break down the formulas they teach leaders and organizations all over the world. One of the key concepts of 4DX is that the process can be simplified, but it does need to be specific, measurable, and hold the individual or team accountable.

Here’s a rundown of the 4 Disciplines:

Discipline 1: Focus on a Wildly Important Goal (WIG)

We’re all familiar with the foundations of goal setting: SMART, KISS, etc. But according to the authors of 4DX, we fail to reach our goals because we don’t choose to be specific enough in what we want to accomplish. Earlier in the year, I wrote about Gary Keller’s One Thing, and how starting with one changeable goal will always lead to greater success than juggling four or five broad goals. Most of us have more than one goal running at the same time. We may want to improve our health, our relationships, our workplace environment, our screen time habits, but the main objective of 4DX is to focus on a WIG. A typical WIG follows an achieve X to Y by When formula, but it has to be the goal that has the greatest impact on your day-to-day operations.

Philadelphia Union coach Bradley Carnell has said, “We want to score 60% of our goals off transitions by the end of the season.”

A seasonal dieter might say, “I want to go from 160 pounds to 150 pounds before summer.”

A sales consultant might say, “I want to increase my database from 500 to 600 clients by the end of the next quarter.”

Brainstorm your top goals then choose the WIG that impacts all the others and can stimulate greater clarity outside of your whirlwhind, what 4DX calls the regular daily management that consumes 80% or more of our time. What makes this goal so important? A team that already scores off set pieces and possession may want to alter their strategy by focusing on a different phase of the game with greater potential to increase goal production. Someone who just had a health scare may want to focus more on their physical habits. A business may be in need of boosting their potential clients to compensate for the loss of market share to a competitor. Break those desires into a simple desired outcome.

Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures

Too often our goals fail because we never identify the day-to-day actions needed to achieve those goals. Discipline 2 is where the rubber meets the road.

4DX refers to these outcomes in terms of lag measures and lead measures. A lag measure is how we analyze the actual goal, whereas a lead measure is how we track the activity that helps us accomplish our goal. Lag measures are based on the past. If you hop on a scale, the scale is only reading past habits and performances. It’s not considering the bag of tortilla chips you ate over three days that added an extra 1,500 calories or the workout you just crushed. A lead measure is rooted in the present. It tells you whether or not you are achieving your daily actions, which will have a major impact on your WIG.

If the WIG is to score 60% of team goals off transitions, the lead measure must be an influential action that affects the performance. A team like the Philadelphia Union focuses on turnovers per game in the opponent’s defensive third. Why? Because that metric is a foundation of how they want to score goals, and if they can measure how many times they turn the ball over in an opponent’s end, they believe it will increase the number of goals they score off transitions.

Too many people attempting to lose weight only scale watch. Instead, they can track their calorie input and expenditure, the ratio of macronutrients, or even simpler how often they substituted one healthy snack for an unhealthy snack. A salesperson who wishes to increase business must increase their engagement with potential customers: making more cold calls, attending more networking events, or pursuing more sponsorship opportunities, all actions that influence the desired WIG.

The point of the lead measure is to focus on the process, the controllable actions rather than the goal itself. Just like a WIG, lead measures have to be specific, so it’s immediately known whether the action has been completed.

One of my personal lead measures is to write 1,000 words a day. I either reach the lead measure or I don’t. There Is no gray.

Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

Tracking is one of the steps of the goal-setting process that loses most people. James Clear, in Atomic Habits, calls habit tracking one of the most important determining factors of success. The authors of 4DX agree. Competitors will embrace this part of the process. The scoreboard is simple and revealing because it tells you whether you are winning or losing. The scoreboard doesn’t care about time of possession or how many tackles you won (only if they are your lead measures), but whether or not you achieved your lead measure that day.

If the team wants to force four turnovers in their opponents defensive third, and they forced five, they won. If your goal is to consume 1,800 calories a day and that last brownie pushed you to 2,200, you lost. If you attended one networking event and added five new contacts, and the goals is five per week, then you nailed it.

The value of scoreboards is anyone can create them specifically to track any desired measure. As we’ve grown more comfortable with the world of analytics in sports, we have a better understanding and appreciation for tracking measures responsible for predicting winning. Apply the same practice toward achieving your WIG. Become the Billy Beane of your domain.

Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

While Disciplines 2 and 3 break a goal down into simpler terms to increase the likelihood of success, Discipline 4 is where we bring lag measures and lead measures to the present consciousness. All of this planning and preparation is futile if we never take the time to assess our performance on a regular basis. After a game, most professional teams don’t just pack it in, shrug their shoulders, and hope something different happens in the next game. They review game videos and highlight their lead measures based on success and areas for improvement.

The point is, how will you ever know if you’re making progress or falling behind if you never take the time to stop and check to see where you’re at? What good is a diet or health plan if you never review your data points? If a pilot is flying from New York to California, do they ever check to see if they’re still on the right heading or just assume they’ll know when they get there? Unfortunately, too many of us forget to monitor our process and make the necessary adjustments in the present.

The authors of 4DX suggest taking the time at least once a week to check in. Some teams conduct these check-ins daily, others monthly (considered too long by 4DX), while most unsuccessful goal setters wait until the deadline. I often use a technique called Me Meetings, where I reserve a 30-60 minute time block on the weekend, when I’m free from distractions, so I can review last week’s performance and what I can do to make sure I hit my measures the following week.

We’ve reached the stage of our New Year’s resolutions where our process must replace our initial motivation. The 4 Disciplines of Execution can be a valuable resource to help get your daily actions aligned with your long-term goals and create a regular habit of accountability. The beauty of goal setting and building a sustainable process is that it can start right now. Goals don’t need to be set in January in order to be effective. WIGs can be made today. Lead measures can be tracked right now. The overall action is to get focused about a process, and 4DX offers its reader numerous examples of how that process can lead to long-term growth and success.