Written by Josh Trebilcock, Head of Marketing at Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?.
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE GOOD IDEAS THAN THERE IS CAPACITY TO EXECUTE THEM.
Focus is about saying ‘no’ in order to achieve your goal:
We live in a world of information overload, time scarcity and competing priorities. Microsoft recently reported that over the past year, the average time spent in meetings has doubled. The average person is sending 42% more chats after hours. We’re communicating more about our jobs. Which is leaving less time, and brain space, to actually do our jobs. The need has never been greater for leaders to ensure people are dedicating time to a clear and strategically focused direction.
In a business context, leaders play a key role in cutting through noise to focus on what’s most important. Narrowing focus to a few key things can be the difference between your team doing a few key things well rather than many badly – ultimately, it could be what determines achieving your strategic goals vs not. In being choiceful around where to play, by focusing on progressing performance in a few key areas, as a team, you can be greater than the sum of your parts. Why? So that you and your team can add the most boat speed and have the best chance of reaching your Gold Medal. By focusing on less, you can accomplish more.
So how do leaders first carve out that clarity? But also, how do they resist the focus traps along the way to stay their company’s course on the journey to their goal?
Our founder Ben Hunt-Davis and their rowing eight crew were relentlessly focused en route to their Gold Medal. They may not have been the strongest physically or the most gifted technically, but they made up for that by being laser-focused on what was most important in their performance that would make the boat go faster. If it didn’t, they didn’t do it. This gave them the best chance of achieving their result. As Ben writes in the book:
The idea was to challenge every single thing we were doing. Absolutely everything, as to whether it would make the boat go faster. We had one very simple, clear, well-defined goal and everything we did, every conversation, every interaction, every action, every decision had to be about making the boat go faster
In an organisational context, our 10 years of experience enabling companies to achieve their ‘Crazy Goals’ (their equivalent of Ben’s Gold Medal) tells us that leaders and their teams can benefit by:
- Focusing on what’s most important – what are your key Concrete Goals?
- Focus your attention on the performance that drive these.
- Saying ‘no’ as you go to ensure you stay on course.
1. Focusing on what’s most important:
What are your Concrete Goals (the key target metrics you want to achieve)?
We help companies and their teams get clarity on their ambition and support them to achieve it. We commonly advise that companies form three to five tight, finish line metrics that indicate to them they have achieved what they set out to. Any less than 3-5, it’s not ambitious enough. Anything more usually results in the attention becoming too diffused, likely straying into the land of diminishing returns (usually stemming from not having enough capacity to execute these areas well). For Ben and the crew, a key measure was knowing they could row 2km in 5m:18secs. If they could do that consistently, they knew they would be in with a chance of winning their Gold. What are your ‘finish line’ metrics that tell you your goal is achieved? What clear measures will tell you you’ve achieved your Gold Medal?
This is a key starting point of clarity to form, as it allows us to then open up discussion around the performance and process that goes into each, to focus your attention accordingly.
The below video is taken from a recent webinar, where Ben shares our Olympic-winning approach in more detail:
2. Focus your attention on the performance that drives those Concrete Goals:
We do a lot of work with our clients on separating performance and results. If you listen to elite sportspeople they rarely dwell on the result. To them, a result is in the past as soon as it has happened. They quickly turn to analysing their performance.
Q. What went well?
Q. What didn’t?
Q. Where can I improve?
(watch any of the interviews with England’s Lionesses and you don’t have to look far! Even in the hysteria of their incredible Euros victory – Sarina Wiegman shares here how their drive to ‘be better every day’ drove them to bring football home)
In the book, Ben and Harriet compare performance vs results to being like baking a cake – the ingredients that you include are like your performance recipe, the cake you bake is the end result. Get curious about your recipe – what goes into it that works? Vice versa, perhaps there are ingredients that are not working or some that you are missing. Spend time thinking about what you need to focus on in the upcoming months in relation to your Concrete Goals. What conscious decisions can you make around how you are going to spend your time? What are the key ingredients you need to focus attention on that will bake the cake you want to see? Ben and the crew would experiment to try and test different ways of doing things whether it was their technique, physically or how they were working together on or off the water. By reviewing regularly using the above questions, they were able to learn how to continuously improve their performance in the areas that mattered most. Watch Ben share how in this short clip below:
3. Say ‘no’ as you go, to stay on course:
Keeping a tight focus is especially tricky if it involves saying ‘no’ to good ideas. Most intelligent, ambitious people when they see a good idea want to pursue it. They are wired to do more. Mark Barden and Adam Morgan refer in their book to ‘beautiful constraints’ – the idea that the modern leader needs to hone their skills in transforming limitations into advantages. To begin to make more from less and to find the opportunity within constraints – they need to keenly focus time and resource. This is not a new idea. Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese military treatise The Art of War – was a big proponent of strategy as much about where we don’t attack as about where we do. As Michael Porter supports, “the essence of competitive strategy is choosing what not to do”. In the video below, former Apple designer Jony Ive sums this up brilliantly by sharing how good Steve Jobs was at saying “no” to good ideas in pursuit of a tight focus on the great:
Apple as a company is a good example of someone who have their Concrete Goals nailed and are uncompromising in their focus to reach it. As Tim Cook, CEO put it back in 2008:
We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of, or have knowledge of. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple’s revenues last year were $40 billion.
Ben and the crew were relentless in their focus to stay on course. Even if a bright shiny tempting new idea came up! If it didn’t make the boat go faster, they didn’t do it. Watch Ben speak on their ongoing commitment to the goal and how the crew embedded that into their decision-making process to keep focused as they went:
If you’d like to learn more about how we could support you and your team in defining your Crazy Goal and supporting you to achieve it, get in touch via our Contact Us page to arrange a no strings attached exploratory call.
Note: We’ve shared a lot in the above about getting focused! To engage everyone in that direction is a topic for another day – watch this space, I’ll be writing another article on this, coming soon! If you’d like to receive this and any of our other performance insight articles feel free to sign up to our monthly newsletter HERE.
