Does focusing on just 3 things make sense?

The Art of Focusing on Three??

By David J. Abbott

“Focus and simplicity... once you get there, you can move mountains” said Steve Jobs.

Out of all things that need addressing, what are the 3 areas, that if focused on, will make the biggest positive difference in your work place ????It may sound crazy, but there are three leverage points, ?that?if addressed will best propel you and your organisation?to meet its goals – and much greater impact ???They are likely not the items, all the objectives, goals and targets in your?planning?documents.??It’s the things that if focused on in the next say 60 days, with a sense of urgency and possibility will have a leverage point difference. ?“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”?said Archimedes, two thousand years ago.??Metaphors aside, in practice: What is that lever, what is that fulcrum in your ?organisation?

Business is filled with ambiguity and uncertainty.??In order to get through, hopefully Zoom through, ?what can be confusing?workdays,?focus is your most important asset. ?Managers risk having?the desired impact when they think they have to be involved in every aspect of their business. ?Risk is that one spends valuable time and brainpower on low-priority, energy draining decisions. ?In continuing to do this, ?the danger is that, with time ?managers feel overworked and just plain burned out.

Instead of ?trying?to do everything, it’s time to focus on the right things. In 2020,?Trey Taylor wrote a book: “A CEO Only Does Three Things” ?which focuses in on his suggested three pillars of business: ?culture, people, and numbers.

No fairy tale magic wand

It would be great if there was just?one single secret ingredient that will fix everything, ?and magically create the ?business success one dreams of.

In the hard light of the day, you come to realise that there is no one factor that will single-handedly make your organisation successful. ?Just as ?there is no single ingredient that makes a meal tasty.?There is no one part of your car’s engine that’s more important than the others. Like any well-oiled machine, your business needs multiple elements, fitting together and complementing each, for you to see the results you want.

Businesses have the advantage of knowing exactly where they stand in terms of profit and loss.?In the NGO and donor community, working in the realm of social good, it is much more difficult to know the impact one is having. ??By the time a mid or final programme evaluation reveals that the precious funding has not had the desired impact, it is often too late to be proactive, and take the required actions.?For NGOs running a large programme, with multiple initiatives and donors can be quite tricky. It can get quite confusing to know what to focus on.?In the worst case scenario, the risk is that in trying to be everything to everyone,?one becomes nothing to a few, severely diluting any value proposition.

If you see the words efficiency and effectiveness lumped together in the same sentence, a warning bell should go off in your grey matter.??Efficiency and effectiveness are two very different things.?Efficiency is a measure of output over input, indicating how productively the resources at hand were used.??Simply put, efficiency is doing things right, while effectiveness is doing the right things.?Risk is that one can be extremely efficient, at doing a task that just isn’t all that significant, it doesn’t make much difference.

Nothing new under the sun. ?

Idea of focus goes back millennia, perhaps even all the way to the Garden of Eden.

In more recent times, the concept of ?focus, in the form of ?critical success factors, (also known as key results areas) was first developed by D. Ronald Daniel, in his 1961 Harvard Business Review article "Management Information Crisis".?John Rockart, of MIT's Sloan School of Management, built on and popularized the idea almost twenty years later.?He defined a critical success factor as: "The limited number of areas in which results, if they are satisfactory, will ensure successful competitive performance for the organization. They are the few key areas where things must go right for the business to flourish. If results in these areas are not adequate, the organization's efforts for the period will be less than desired.”

Problem is that, in the 40 years since those words were written, we have had an ICT information [big bang]?explosion, where there has been the creation of an almost astronomical number of indicators, managers use to assess performance, on several dimensions.?Yet, in this confusing universe of possibilities, how is it possible to simplify and focus in?

When all is said and done, what should those three focus areas be ??How do you get to the point when you are clear on what they should be ??What shouldn’t?they be ??These are things that if focus on, the greatest movement forward will be created.??They are not necessarily the points that are already laid out in the mass of planning documents. May be that what needs to be focused on is not the obvious, it may be counter intuitive.?For instance, in a sometimes laid back NGO that aims to influence public policy, ?it may be getting staff to respond to all communication and e mails by the close of the business day, sending a real time signal of being sharp and responsive. ?

So how do you decide what those three critical areas are ??There are a number of routes you can take. ?Genuine organisational change always begins with a sense of urgency, imagine that in the next 30 to 60 days you wanted to create a shift, a sense of momentum, a significant impact, here are some possible approaches:

1. Question the status quo, question the default position – don’t take the status quo, the way things have always been for granted, after all someone created the systems, approaches, in the beginning, they are not engraved in stone.
2. Avoid the confirmation bias – the tendency to interpret all new information, ?in a way that is compatible, in alignment with existing beliefs.?One way to do this is sit down with your staff and ask them to write in confidence on index cards, ?what they think the three priority areas should be.?Aim is that no one will know what the other person has written, then post them up on a wall, and cluster them by themes, and discuss.?Look out for the outliers, the ideas that look wacky, that may contain real gems.
3. Get out of the noise, get out of your normal workspace -- and go for a long walk, or meditate.?Just sit outside, breath in and breath out, ?and try and quiet your mind, which you will see is quite difficult to do.?There will always be that constant chattering in your head,?but with time it will dissipate.??"Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice” was how the co-founder of Apple said it.??Trust your gut, trust your intuition.

Move into action – once you have the 3 areas, take the first steps. Nothing happens until something moves.?This may mean taking a small [low risk] gamble, doing something outside your perceived limitation.?Don’t be afraid of losing, be afraid of not trying, not taking the initial?moves forward.??“Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you'll be able to see further” was how Thomas Carlyle expressed it.

David ??[email protected] ?is a director at aCatalyst Consulting.