What if you always headed in one direction? What if your entire organization did this? Where would you be in one year? Five years? What if every time you went to make a decision you check it to make sure that it helped move closer to that single point?
Strategic planning can be extremely sophisticated, but this year I’m advocating that you make it extremely simple. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras call this a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG). Sean Covey and Chris McChesney call them Wildly Important Goals.
This year I’m advocating for something much simpler! Just pick One Direction! One Thing! One Outcome!
We all need to go back to the days of our child hood where we asked a ton of questions. Imagine yourself saying why over and over. This totally helps for getting to the root cause of a problem or issue.
Ask why over and over until you get to the real root cause.
The above diagram was an attempt for me to apply 5 Whys to my life as well as use it to help educate others on my team about finding the root cause to a problem.
Why were we late in delivering a website to a customer? It didn’t pass user acceptance in time.
Why did it fail user acceptance testing? We missed some things that the customer expected.
Why did it fail to meet the customers expectations? We didn’t have clear requirements.
Why weren’t the requirements clear? We didn’t have a business analyst on the team?
Why wasn’t there a business analyst driving the project? We had too many projects going on at the same time.
How can you use 5 Whys to improve your org and your team? Read Pascal’s book and then figure out how you can share what you learn with your team.
