The 4 Disciplines of Execution of Great Ideas
Excellent ideas like the plan for ensuring transformational learning leveraging digital solutions may suffer if not executed properly. Brilliant execution strategies makes the difference. Team members, in this case, teachers and administrators of the school, must be engaged and hence the need for the disciplines of execution. Every organizational leaders and their team members have to deal with urgent whirlwinds daily which can destroy great ideas unless a system is built to withstand and filter through these noises to identify the signals. The signal is my wildly important goal that when achieved can maximize outcomes. Each system built around the following four disciplines will strength the results achieved. Each of the disciplines needs a learning phase, application, facilitation and creation.
- Focus on your Wildly Important Goals – Ensuring of all the urgent rush, we filter to what truly important and go for it. Focus requires that the team Learns, Apply, Facilitate and Create with the focused energy.
- Measure lead behaviors – Check what the lag time between your WIG and the achievement of our goals is. There is the lag measure which tells us when we achieve our goal, and the lead measures are indicators to predict that we are moving towards achieving our goals. We must measure critical day to day behaviors (lead measure) that ultimately increase our main outcome (lag measure).
- Put up the score boards – People play differently when they know what the score. establishing a good monitoring and evaluation system with a clear and objective dashboard drives engagement. A dashboard, visual board or a Kanban board in agile project management is established for this. It will help get the team members engaged with our goals. The board should increase visibility for our WIG’s Lead and Lag measure. It will also help us check by continuous measurement if our lead measure are contributing to the achievement of our lag measure.
- Schedule weekly accountability talks – Speak to what you promised to do, what you eventually did and what’s the plan for next week. This is simply what is termed retrospective in agile project management. For my innovation plan we have established this cadence to drive student adoption of the e-Portfolio alongside their teachers. So this weekly touch base meetings helps to reflect and collaborate on improvement plans.
When team have clarity and their engagement is stronger, to execute at speed becomes easy in this organization.
Reference
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOhF6T5D8X8 – Introduction to 4DX OS
- The 4 Disciplines of Execution in a Nutshell – https://youtu.be/2HKn49r3-Ko
- The Four Disciplines of Execution: Achieving your Wildly Important Goals – Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling,