The Urgency Mindset: Accelerating Business Transformation through Decisive Action

Urgency: Produce Exceptional Outputs, double quick!

The output of a Business Transformation is the sum of the outputs from the team.

Winning the race ahead of your competition is achievable only through enforcing the urgency of decision and execution?in accomplishing the Enterprise's mission and Team goals.?

Hustle People! Hustle! ??

Oodles of inertia-induced slack throughout your enterprise slows you down like extra fat in your body..

Over time the people in an organisation settle into a tempo and pace that is theirs and generally expected inside. When this tempo is mainly tempered by the fears of past failures, over-cautiousness sets in, and considerable inertia-induced slack naturally becomes the norm, slowing you down without you even realising it. Just like the frog in the well knows nothing of the sea, the opportunity to reduce oodles of this slack by exercising the urgency of decision and execution is right under our noses, yet, leaders and employees stay ignorant of it or choose to maintain their inherent inertia.?

The role of every leader is to convert that lingering potential into superior results. It is tough, but gets rid of that excess fat for a leaner, more energised enterprise.?

It is not easy. It will drive people out of their comfort zones. It is difficult to change that which has become the norm. There will be resistance.

Yet, you can do it. It requires a commitment to the urgency of the decision and execution of the Performance Triad.

The Performance Triad: Kill the Slack

How?much?faster do you run?

How?much?higher are your standards?

How?hard?do you focus?

The compound effect of the three can be electrifying.

Increasing Velocity: How?much?faster do you run?

In the world of software, we often sit around tables talking about what we need in the product and when we can expect to see it. Development teams tend to come back with unacceptable time frames because they operate at a cadence that the organisation generally expects and stop thinking with enough?urgency. But with leaders driving up the tempo, somebody suddenly figures out how to do things dramatically quickly.

Urgency changes speed.

Stepping up the pace does not just cause people to do things faster but do them differently. As a result, they become more demanding of others. That is precisely the type of healthy contest that we want in a winning enterprise.?

Urgency?changes behaviours.

But should we aim for getting just 20% faster? That is barely discernible! You will be back in your old ways before long. The pace has to be profound yet palatable, breathtaking, and order-of-magnitude higher.?

Key questions to ask to increase velocity:

Start with a simple question: "What did you deliver this sprint?" That's it. Then get more demanding: "Okay, fine, but what did you deliver to production? How quickly are we getting many ideas to market?"

Raising Standards: How?much?higher are your standards?

When stepping up the pace, inevitably, excuses are made about quality. We can’t possibly move this fast?and?maintain quality, surely? That's right because we will actually move?fast?and?raise?quality. This way of thinking has a compounding impact on productivity. It is not impossible, like defying gravity, but achievable by beating out oodles of slack from the system.

Urgency teaches us how quickly we can become much better.

Everyone needs to raise their standards to benefit both customers and themselves.?

The Urgency for higher standards for your Customer:

The late Steve Jobs had only two classifications: a feature is either ‘insanely great’ or ‘total shit’. There is no middle ground. Steve took it away. Don’t we all want to be insanely great? You want people on your bus who easily relate to this habit of thinking.

Urgency to bring your dreams to life makes it easy to see your top choices.

The Urgency for higher standards for Your Employees:

Your employees are your largest, long-term assets and, if not actively groomed for the future profitability of your enterprise, become your biggest blockers. Ask your people whether they?like?their work or whether they?love?it. Are they self-motivated to feel strongly, even passionately, about what they produce? It changes things perceptibly. Retaining growth mindsets and moving mental boundaries is what this is.

Urgency to maximise outputs from your employees drives you to focus on setting right expectations and cultural values and?shaping the field for them.?

Create an environment where motivated people can flourish.

When Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity (“CUA”) are low, a team’s performance is influenced by expectations (via role definitions, setting objectives, checking in and reviewing performance). When CUA is high, the behaviour is influenced by cultural values (as articulated and exemplified by the leaders). Leaders need to choose which mode to use depending on context.

This model assumes individuals share?group interests.?If individuals are highly?self-interested,?their behaviours are influenced very differently. When CUA is low, they behave based on incentives (a.k.a free market forces like commission rewards for selling certain products). When CUA is high, individuals with high self-interest and low group interest will be unmanageable, like people panicking on a sinking ship. The mix of self-interest and group-interest can shift over time. Leaders carry the responsibility to align team members to group interests.

Be warned, Transformations are fast-paced, high CUA events. Their success demands that leaders and followers alike, demonstrate grit, tenacity and creativity, which is hard to find in organisations with high inertia-induced slack.

Urgency to inject group-interest thinking mandates that you recruit drivers on your execution team bus, allocate consent-based decision authority to them, and actively herd the people who are passengers, just tagging along for the ride, to be better followers - no backseat driving tolerated!

Turn the workplace into a playing field. Transform employees into athletes.

Increase motivation and capability in every team member to increase individual performance.?

First, understand the highest-motivational needs of the employee: is it about increasing competence or achievement? and preferred measure: is it through comparison with others or with objective benchmarks? Then use it to shape the field where employees feel the trust and support to rise up to be self-motivated to adopt the discipline required for the stretch expected from them.

Urgency for your employees to do their best for their mission demands that, like a coach motivating athletes, you “shape the field” to create the #trust, #support, #discipline and #stretch, that motivates team members to grow to the limits of their abilities.

Key questions to ask to create urgency in your teams towards your customers and themselves :

How much time do we spend on optimisations versus bigger bets, and how long does it take for them to happen? How do we differentiate ourselves??

Narrowing The Focus: How?hard?do you focus?

Quickening the pace also drives a narrower focus. You naturally cannot move very fast when you push on too many fronts in parallel. And if you lack focus at the top? Well, then it will be much more so at the bottom.?

Focus on vital, measurable indicators of output.?

The operations in an organisation are like a “black box” in that you can’t see everything that’s happening daily. Indicators let you “cut holes” in the black box to forecast the trend of your company outputs. Train your team to select a small number of objective, quantifiable measures for?outputs?with leading and trending indicators that they can review daily and help transform a business for the better. Avoid measures of activity, subjective measures and unquantifiable measures. Your job is to identify, closely monitor and effectively manage the “vital few” indicators of performance trends over the “compelling many”.

Urgency forces you to focus on the vital few, over the compelling m a n y.

Doing so requires urgency of effective execution and making important decisions.

Urgency of effective execution: Focus on outputs from the ONE top priority

The fastest way to move a dial is narrow the focus. Yet, while people can typically tell you after some deliberation what their top three priorities are, they struggle to decide on just one. It goes against our human grain. Many organisations are focused a mile wide and an inch deep. Surely, you are not surprised when they progress at a snail's pace.

Urgency to go to market requires you swarm on that ONE priority. Then it no longer competes for resources with a bunch of other ones. Things begin to move, real stuff gets done, and we can move to the next priority. All of a sudden top priorities are on the move.

Urgency in making important decisions:?What are you not going to do?

For effective execution to produce trailblazing outputs, we first must sort out what is truly important, what isn’t, and when. Procrastinating on that by declaring multiple priorities makes us sound thoughtful and comprehensive, but it profoundly lacks the punch and impact needed to get your people moving. It reminds us of Mark Twain — 'I?didn't?have time?to write a?short letter, so?I?wrote a?long one?instead'. Pointed, critical thinking is rare.?

Decisions are the output of a process framed by six questions.?

What decision is needed? By when? Who should you consult? Who decides? Who ratifies or vetoes? Who needs to be informed? In technology-led business, we must mix knowledge-power people with position-power people daily to get to a clear decision and ensure support for the output, even from dissenters, together they make decisions that could affect us for years to come. Decisions should be made at the?lowest competent level?by someone with detailed technical understanding and past experiences, both good and bad, from different implementation approaches. When no one has both, create a composite opinion from the people available.

Key questions to ask to induce urgency of effective execution and making important decisions:

What are you not going to do?

Focus calls for hard work once you understand what that means: What are you not going to do??

Finally,?Assess your own output.?

Objectively introspect on the performance triad as applied to yourself. Where in your actions lies oodles of slack? What extraordinary outputs can you produce when you irradicate that?

Remember, a sense of urgency for decision and execution is the key to a successful business transformation. Oodles of inertia-induced slack throughout your enterprise slows you down like extra fat in your body. Exercising the performance triad -?Increasing Velocity, Raising Standards, Narrowing The Focus -?can reduce slack considerably and produce quality outputs faster. Are you moving fast enough? What are you not going to do? How do we differentiate ourselves? These questions will help you achieve superior results in the shortest possible time.