CXL - Accelerating execution?

Your host today is Merritt Aho, President at CXL

Too damn slow. That's the pace of business.

I'm on a quest to learn what empowers fast execution. Here's what I've observed as contributing...

Accelerator 1: Prioritization. You can move a lot quicker on something when you clear off the rest of your agenda to do it. Hard, isn't it? And usually not realistic to just have one priority. This is about saying no to as many things as you can, so that you can say make the critical few things happen. The 4 Disciplines of Execution has a lot to say about this. You can only have one "wildly important goal" (WIG) at a time. The moment you add a second, you divide attention and lose focus.

Accelerator 2: Distributed decision making (power/authority). Decisions slow down progress. They require information and depend on power dynamics. In most places, key decisions involve several people which means coordination is involved. A despot may move quickly at times by eliminating resistance in key decisions, but cannot be effective if they make themselves a bottleneck of information and minor decisions.

In contrast, if front-line workers are empowered to make decisions you can react more quickly to changes on the ground. This assumes they have good info on the vision or goal and overarching strategy. Their decisions need to align. But even if they make mistakes, "done is better than perfect" (Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In). You also need a culture that tolerates some degree of failure to create the psychological safety for people to make the best decisions from the front-line.

Accelerator 3: DAILY war room meetings. It's hard to not think of McChrystal's Team of Teams, here. Massive undertaking. Daily 2-hour meeting with hundreds of attendees spanning the layers of multiple military and bureaucratic organizations. Sounds like a slog. But it got the job done. And that job is to share information and make decisions. This aligns people to the state of things, the current problems and the pathway forward.

My own experience is on a much smaller scale with Scrums and Tiger Teams. But in each case, the principles are the same:

• Get ALL the people needed for info and action together
• Report progress
• Identify next actions
• Make commitments
• Rinse/repeat until goal achieved

What we're optimizing for here seems mainly to be:

1. Availability of resources (mostly time from required people)
2. Proximity of resources (synchronicity and physical proximity)

But then there's process for how those resources get coordinated. The norms they abide by and the procedures they use. I'm afraid I haven't seen the effective patterns emerge, here.

Connect with Merritt on LinkedIn.

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Ognjen Bošković
Growth Lead at CXL

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