Chapter 3
Timing and Momentum
Maintaining a Sense of Urgency for a Long Time
The Forecast Is Hazy…
Now you are somewhere in the “Middle.” There is work getting done. But something is missing. The motivation for the new work is hard to see. The excitement from the beginning is waning as all of the present activity re-asserts itself. You are frustrated that the strategy is not moving forward in a decisive way. There are some stalls—some late or lethargic starts. You can't feel forward momentum and urgency and you are starting to worry…
What Everyone Is Thinking
“Did we start yet?” It seems like I heard some stuff about that a while ago…. I haven't really noticed a change so far. My job is the same. We still have all the same problems. Oh well, as I understand it, this was a long-term strategy, so maybe we didn't really kick it off yet. In any case, I don't need to worry about it for a while because we have a lot of time.”
Focus on Mid-Term Checkpoints
There is a strong organizational tendency for people to think that they don't have to worry about anything in month 1 of an 18-month initiative.
When people focus only on the long-term end goal, then the first step in their long-term journey is a delay. It's important to create a framing of the initiative in a way that avoids this early sense of complacency.
In the last chapter we talked about the importance of defining concrete outcomes. The next tool to keep everyone on track through the Middle is timing. Once you have defined concrete outcomes that will enable your long-term goal, you need to get your team to define smaller, mid-term checkpoints and deliverables that are necessary at specific mid-points all the way through the Middle, to achieve your desired outcomes.
By placing these clear, mid-term checkpoints on a timeline, you will create the light posts that the organization needs in order to see where they are going through the long Middle—and to keep going. These become not only your mid-term checkpoints, but also your enablers of urgency—if you place them on a timeline so they occur at an aggressive pace, you will be creating the urgency you desire. Whenever I see an executive say, “I want to see a sense of urgency,” I always wonder what, specifically, they want to see. Do they want to see people running around in a panic? Would that make them feel better? If you want urgency, define urgency by what you put on the timeline.
One of the biggest challenges of the Middle, because it's so long, is to simply know where you are at any point in time. Without these mid-term check points, while you are in the Middle you won't be able to know if you are making progress. Ten months into an 18-month initiative, the progress might not yet be palpable. And if everyone can't see and feel that you are making progress, they will most likely not keep going. You will lose momentum. People will ask, “Are we still doing this?” Your strategic progress will stall.
Stage the Mid-term Checkpoints Out Over a Timeline
There is a pretty simple approach to accomplish this, and it is profoundly helpful. This is the same process I use when I take teams through my Strategy into Action process.
For each of the concrete outcomes you have defined, create a blank timeline and work through the following questions with your team. Let's imagine that your timeline is one year. (You can do this for a timeline of any duration.):
- What will we measure at the end (12 months out)? This is the easy part. Everyone loves an end goal!
- If we have achieved that outcome, what must be true/done/existing nine months out? What will we see? (Put the third-quarter mid-point outcome on the timeline.)
- If that is true at nine months, what must we have finished at the halfway point? What will we see? What will we measure at the halfway point to ensure we are on track? (Put the mid-point outcome on the timeline.)
- If that is true at the six-month mark, what needs to be defined, planned, and started at the three-month mark? What will we see? (Put the three-month outcome on the timeline.)
- If that needs to be done in three months, then what do we need to start now?
“What Will We See?”
“What will we see?” is a very powerful and focusing question. By forcing the team to define mid-point milestones that you can see, you are, in fact, building a good strategy that describes what you will do throughout the Middle. Things you can see are concrete. Describing the right mid-term checkpoints will point to specific, prioritized work.
Example: “Sell Higher”
For example, your goal is to “sell higher” in your enterprise accounts. That is your big, vague end goal. You have, then, also defined your strategy in terms of concrete outcomes to be: 50 new executive level relationships and 5 big deals closed by the end of the first year. Even though that is more concrete than “we need to sell higher,” that only measures what it looks like when it is done, not what it needs to look like along the way.
So what happens is that everyone nods their heads and goes back to work. Nothing changes. You've got plenty of time. Kevin is working on a plan. Business still comes in. Everyone is busy and that's the end of that. By the time Kevin is ready to present the plan, there is no longer an appetite for it because everyone is busy.
But if you force yourself to define (at the beginning) what you will see at the mid-points before you send Kevin off to create a plan, you can keep everyone focused. For example: At three quarters out, what you could see is that there are 30 new big deals under discussion, and 10 of them are officially in the pipeline. Then you ask, for that to be true nine months out, what would need to be true in six months? In six months we could see that 50 target accounts are defined and 50 executives are named, and each one has a salesperson assigned and a quota for the next 18 months.
Then you need to ask, for that to be true six months out, what will need to be true one quarter out? What would we see? Well, that might be that 100 accounts are selected for vetting, and that 25 sales reps in North America where you decide to pilot the program have gone through a training, and have found an external mentor who can help them up their sales skill level.
If that were true one quarter out, that means that one month out, you need to have identified these first 25 sales reps and created a headhunting firm of sorts to help match them up with external mentors.
Do you notice the difference? Without this process, people leave the meeting nodding their heads and thinking, Yeah, that's important, but we have a year to get it done, so I don't need to worry about it for a while. When you get a task that will take a year, on any Monday early in the process, you kind of still have a year. If you don't start it for a month, you still have most of the year. But this thinking can repeat over and over again. Suddenly you are 10 months in and still have 12 months of work left to do.
But if instead you define the timeline up front, and you leave the meeting with checkpoints already defined for three, six, and nine months out, people leave the meeting with specific actions that need to be done as soon as one month out!
People can't simply just go back to work and feel like they have a year to make it come true. They have tasks to do starting immediately!
Long-term initiatives suffer from what feels like an abundance of time in the beginning. So it requires that the leader in charge stays diligent about guiding people through the Middle with the right, concrete, mid-term checkpoints.
Shine a Spotlight on the Middle, Consistently…for a Long Time
The Middle is also dangerous simply because it is long. We can all more easily deal with important things that take a short time. We get the feeling, “I can do that,” because when we can see the beginning, the Middle, and the end of something all at once we know how to finish it. Keeping progress going on an initiative or transformation that spans months or years is really hard for any human or team because you can't see the whole thing right now.
When I use this approach with leadership teams of working backwards from the due date and defining concrete outcomes—defining and committing to things you can see along the way, we often go from the team thinking they have plenty of time to realizing that they are already late! When you create a timeline of specific concrete, see-able checkpoints through the Middle, strategic progress and a sense of urgency are ensured because you have clearly mapped it out.
Create a Timeline
One communication tool that I have found to be enormously helpful to illuminate the path through the Middle is a simple timeline that articulates the strategy and the key milestones (the things you can see) along the way throughout the Middle. I always have a timeline with me that looks something like Figure 3.1.
Figure 3.1 Timeline Communication Tool
Building Your Communications Timeline
- Always have a “You Are Here” mark on your timeline.
- Make sure that mark is never all the way to the left. It's kind of soul destroying to see that everything that needs to be done is still ahead of you. Having the “You Are Here” mark somewhere toward the Middle is less discouraging. And it lets you create context. It let's you acknowledge people for the work that was done already, and it shows what the future work is building on.
- Put big general milestones and defined control points that everyone can relate to below the line.
- Put specific initiatives or critical tasks to be accomplished above the line.
Once you have created this communication tool, use it over and over again. Pull it out every time you communicate about what you are doing. Update it and show the “You are here” dot moving to the right, and list the finished accomplishments to the left of it. Keep the same future initiatives on the page. After people see this 20 or 100 times they will start to think two things: First, I guess we are making progress even though I can't see it from my desk; and second, I guess we are serious about that stuff on the right because it's not going away.
Using a timeline like this as a communication tool is one of the best defenses against the dreaded question: “Are we still doing this?”
As we'll talk about in Part 3 (V = Valor) and Part 4 (E = Everyone), your team will need you to let them know you are serious—over and over (and over and over) again. Each time you show the timeline, one less person will be asking, “Are we still doing this?” and will just start doing it.