The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey & Jim Huling

 The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey & Jim Huling

By following the 4 Disciplines—Focus on the Wildly Important; Act on Lead Measures; Keep a Compelling Scoreboard; Create a Cadence of Accountability—leaders can produce breakthrough results, even when executing the strategy requires a significant change in behavior from their teams

• The what of business—which we call strategy
• How part is the execution

There are two principal things a leader can influence when it comes to producing results: your strategy (or plan) and your ability to execute that strategy.

As we dug in further, we began to put our finger on a far more fundamental cause of execution breakdown. Certainly all of the problems we just cited—the lack of clarity, commitment, collaboration, and accountability—exacerbate the difficulty of strategy execution.

Examples of strategic moves that require people to change their behavior contrasted with those that can be executed by the stroke of a pen.

Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important

We call this a wildly important goal (WIG) to make it clear to the team that this is the goal that matters most. Failure to achieve it will make every other accomplishment seem secondary, or possibly even inconsequential.

Important goals that require you to do new and different things often conflict with the whirlwind of the day job, made up of urgencies that consume your time and energy.

Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures

This is the discipline of leverage. It’s based on the simple principle that all actions are not created equal. Some actions have more impact than others when reaching for a goal. And it is those that you want to identify and act on if you want to reach your goal. Whatever strategy you’re pursuing, your progress and your success will be based on two kinds of measures: lag and lead.

• Lag measures are the tracking measurements of the wildly important goal, and they are usually the ones you spend most of your time praying over. Revenue, profit, market share, and customer satisfaction are all lag measures, meaning that when you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past. That’s why you’re praying—by the time you get a lag measure, you can’t fix it. It’s history.

• Lead measures are quite different in that they are the measures of the most high-impact things your team must do to reach the goal. In essence, they measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.  A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: It’s predictive of achieving the goal and it can be influenced by the team members

To understand these two characteristics, consider the simple goal of losing weight. While the lag measure is pounds lost, two lead measures might be a specific limit on calories per day and a specific number of hours of exercise per week. These lead measures are predictive because by performing to them, you can predict what the scale (the lag measure) will tell you next week. They are influenceable because both of these new behaviors are within your control.

Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

It must be simple, so simple that members of the team can determine instantly if they are winning or losing. Why does this matter? If the scoreboard isn’t clear, the game you want people to play will be abandoned in the whirlwind of other activities. And if your team doesn’t know whether or not they are winning the game, they are probably on their way to losing.

Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

Team members must be able to hold each other accountable regularly and rhythmically. The 4 Disciplines of Execution. Apple Books. The secret to Discipline 4, in addition to the repeated cadence, is that team members create their own commitments. It’s common to find teams where the members expect, even want, simply to be told what to do. However, because they make their own commitments, their ownership of them increases. 

The 4 Disciplines of Execution are all about producing great results. The disciplines point from right to left because great teams execute from right to left—they hold themselves consistently accountable for performance on lead measures, which in turn drives the achievement of wildly important goals. The compelling scoreboard, Discipline 3, is central because it displays the success measures on the goals for all to see. The cadence of accountability, Discipline 4, surrounds the other disciplines because it holds everything together. The circling arrow symbolizes the practice of regular, frequent accountability for the success measures on the scoreboard.

The 4 Disciplines work because they are based on principles, not practices. Practices are situational, subjective, and always evolving. Principles are timeless and self-evident, and they apply everywhere.

By keeping their weekly commitments, team members influence the lead measure, which in turn is predictive of success on the lag measure of the WIG.

Rule #1: No team focuses on more than two WIGs at the same time.

Rule #2: The battles you choose must win the war. 

Rule #3: Senior leaders can veto, but not dictate.

Rule #4: All WIGs must have a finish line in the form of from X to Y by when.

CHARACTERISTICS OF A COMPELLING PLAYERS’ SCOREBOARD

1. Is it simple? 

2. Can I see it easily?

3. Does it show lead and lag measures?

4. Can I tell at a glance if I’m winning?