Inspiration
To me there is that ever present conflict between the patience required to wait for the goal to materialize and the urgency to get to it. An important realisation is that results are the consequence of what we’ve done. It’s the culmination of every action we’ve performed in the past up to a certain point.
I’ve found the best way to help me out of that conflict is to differentiate between lead and lag measures. If we define the two, it becomes obvious why the differentiation can help you overcome the conflict and achieve your goals.
Most of the goals we set are lag measures. They are the measurable result of what we’d like to achieve, i.e. a certain amount of new users for our product, a number of new customers or sales, etc. What all those have in common: we can’t „do“ them. They lag behind our actions.
Lead measures, however, are measures we can take in order to push towards those goals. They have two distinct characteristics:
1. They are predictive, meaning we’ve identified those measures as likely to allow us to achieve our goal.
2. They are influenceable. They are the measures we and / or our team have the power to directly impact with our actions.
If you want to dive deeper into that topic, I can highly recommend The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling! |
