The true meaning of "Focus on the process, not the result"

Focus on the process, not the result is advice that can be easily misconstrued.

The result we want, in chess, business, charity, is to win. For a nonprofit providing direct services, victory means delivering the best possible outcome to the population it exists to serve. In business, it means satisfying the customer better than the competitors.

And we all know that results can’t be improved “directly.” We can only optimize results by improving the processes that produce them. This is why we have sayings like,

Don’t focus on the result. Focus on the process that creates the result.

However, "focus on the process" can easily devolve into an emphasis of compliance with an overriding, time-consuming, and resource-depleting process.

The right process brings the right results.

The key word here is "right". Just because we have a robust process in place, it doesn't mean it's right--or appropriate in all circumstances. We should be obsessed with improving our processes, not blindly following them.

If achieving the desired outcome often requires you to depart from the process, your process isn't right.

Many experts suggest finding "a middle ground" between following the process and beneficially departing from it when required to achieve the desired outcome. And that may be fine when you face a rare situation where bending the rules makes sense.?

But if you find yourself repeatedly having to bypass a process step to achieve results, that's a clear sign that your rules need to change—potentially to embed more flexibility.

If sticking to the process causes some of your intended audience to give up before they (or you) get the desired results, your process isn't right.

According to an article published in the Fast Company magazine (September 2021 issue), in Orange County, only 6% of the families that are eligible to access subsidized child care actually receive the benefit. One of the key reasons, identified by the president of a local public agency charged with improving early childhood outcomes, is that "the income guidelines are complicated to navigate". This is a clear sign of an inadequate process.

In a recent thread , we were talking about process rigidity, and I recalled the following example:

This example helps us see why good processes have flexibility to accommodate different needs. For this non-profit, a better process flow might work like this:

• Is the new volunteer a recent grad with little experience reviewing non-academic resumes? Stick to the full-fledged training program created to prepare them to perform the task with excellence.
• Is the new volunteer a seasoned professional with a ton of field experience? Give them a short assignment to confirm that they excel at the task without training. If they demonstrate the necessary skills, great, consider them ready. If they do an OK but not excellent job, assign them to the second half of the training, sparing them the introductory part meant for inexperienced volunteers.

The true meaning of "Focus on the process, not the result"

Sports teams seem to have more success with this advice than business teams. It's understandable, since in sports it's easier to determine which steps and procedures are more conducive to high performance.

For example, Trust the Process became a mantra for the Philadelphia 76ers. And before that, the same concept was adopted by American football coach Bill Walsh, whose advanced leadership transformed the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in sports into the Super Bowl champions in the 1981, 1984, and 1988 seasons.

The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership, ?a book written based on a series of interviewers with Walsh and published after his death, describes how the coach got the entire 49ers organization to buy into his philosophy of not focusing on winning games or a championship. Instead, he got the players to concentrate on getting better every game, playing with high levels of accuracy and accountability.

Under Walsh's leadership, the coaching staff identified 30 specific and different physical skills that every offensive lineman needed to master to do his job at the highest level, from tackling to evasion. They then created multiple drills for each of those individual skills, which were practiced relentlessly until their execution at the highest level was automatic.

In business, it's harder to determine what must be present for a process to operate at its highest level. Still, in my career I've identified some conditions that, if met, allow us to "trust the process" to achieve positive impact:

• We're working from clearly defined, well formed outcomes that establish what we want to accomplish.
• We're constantly validating that the process is appropriate to respond to organizational demands (more details below, under "Following the winning steps of coach Bill Walsh").
• We're adjusting the process each time we identify a pattern of having to depart from the process to get results, or see people dropping out of the process because of a rigid rule.

Following the winning steps of coach Bill Walsh

In many situations, the outcome, the direct, intended beneficial effect of a process, may take a long time to materialize.

For example, if your company changes its sales process today with the expected outcome of increasing win rate, depending on the length of your sales cycle, it may take 3, 6, or 12 months for the change to bear fruits. But if you're leaving behind a poor sales process that was chaotic and business-centric and adopting one that is customer-centric and based on good logic, sound principles, and proven techniques, there are plenty of reasons to be patient and stick to the process. It might be tempting to start lowering standards or cutting corners if the results can't be seen quickly, but it takes persistence and consistency of action day-in, day-out to get where we want to go.

As Walsh describes in his interviews, things were in such bad shape when he joined the 49ers that talk of a Super Bowl Championship would have "sounded delusional". His priority was to implement what he called "Standard of Performance": a new way of doing things that went beyond the mechanical elements of doing jobs correctly to include a code of conduct and a set of applied principles that included not getting "crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss".

Adherence to the details of Walsh's Standard of Performance became second nature as the team worked to become absolutely first class in every possible way "on and off the field".

I directed our focus less to the prize of victory than to the process of improving, obsessing, perhaps, about the quality of the execution and the content of our thinking; that is, our actions and attitude. I knew if I did that, winning would take care of itself, and when it didn't I would seek ways to raise our Standard of Performance.

I love the humility demonstrated by coach Walsh in this quote. He had faith in his way of doing things, his philosophy; but he was also committed to learning and improving his thinking. He was ready to accept a change of course when it was required to improve execution.

We can’t control how things will develop, what victories we’ll achieve, how our projects will turn out. But we can control the process. We can set high aspirations to get progressively better over time, and commit to improving business processes to eliminate inflexibility, waste, and result variability.