Ep. 3 - Improve Your Execution With One Simple Formula

In this episode, Marc Whitehead and Diana Berry discuss The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling, also called 4DX. The system is making waves, with implementations from the Naval Medical Center to Marriott. Learn how the Four Disciplines can help your firm move past the daily whirlwind and execute their strategic goals. Determine your wildly important goals, your leading and lagging measures, and create your own scorecard so your team can visualize their contributions. Lastly, learn into why creating a cadence of accountability is both the simplest and the most difficult tenet of 4DX. 

For detailed show notes, read below and use the timestamps to navigate the episode:

[0:45] Marc Whitehead introduces himself and Diana Berry and the topic of the episode, which is 4DX, which stands for the Four Disciplines of Execution. 

[2:02] 4DX has been in the news since the Naval Medical Center began to implement 4DX. Even the military, with hundreds of years of tradition, is looking for a new system! Marriott also implemented 4DX and saw impressive returns. 

[3:09] Planning is much easier than executing your plans. We all have our daily whirlwinds, or things we have to do every day, that leave us stuck and unable to execute the strategic projects that can move our firms forward.

[4:46] Attorneys and litigators also deal with the daily whirlwind. Litigators especially have schedules that are subject to change, making it difficult to block out time. 

[6:27] Marc explains the Eisenhower Matrix, which was part of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. The Eisenhower Matrix splits your time into four quadrants: “important but urgent,” “important but not urgent,” “unimportant but urgent” and “unimportant and not urgent.” It advises people to live in the “important” quadrants of the matrix. 

[7:53] 4DX goes beyond dealing with what is important. It helps businesses get ahead and execute their larger goals over time by keeping strategy from becoming reactive. 

[10:01] The four core tenets of the Four Disciplines of Execution are focus on the wildly important, act on lead measures, keep a compelling scoreboard, and keep a cadence of accountability. To focus on the wildly important, you have to determine your highest priorities and have the courage to say no to other things.

[11:58] Your “WIGs” are your wildly important goals. Ideally, people should keep close to one WIG at a time and should stay below three WIGs. Breaking WIGs down to bite-sized goals each quarter allows firms to execute them over time. 

[12:55] How does Marc Whitehead & Associates determine its WIGs? Firstly, there are different WIGs at different levels. The firm has a firm-wide WIG, and different subgroups have sub-WIGs that align with the overall WIG of the firm.  

[14:23] One firm-wide WIG for this quarter was implementing QBO, or QuickBooks Online with Litify, a case management software to get financial data to “talk to” their production data. This was a difficult project that fell outside of the daily whirlwind.

[16:40] Limiting your WIGs also means not making your whirlwind your WIG. WIGs should focus on strategic goals that fall outside of the daily grind. WIGs also require prioritization, since it is impossible to work on many of them at once

[18:23] The second tenet is to act on “leading” measures as opposed to “lagging” measures. You cannot influence lagging measures – an example would be the profits from the last quarter because they already happened and cannot be changed. The leading measures can be influenced; this would be your profits for the next quarter. 

[20:12] Leading measures tend to be difficult to quantify and track. Revenue, for example, is a lagging measure because you cannot determine revenue until it has already happened. New leads or contracts signed might be leading measures because they are signs of what your revenue could be down the line. Some people’s leading measures could be other people’s lagging measures. For example, cases signed could be a leading measure for the firm as a whole, but a lagging measure for the intake department. 

[22:28] Once you have determined what your lead measures might be, how do you act on them? First, you have to determine a way to quantify what your leading measures are, since they tend to be more difficult to measure. For example, Marc Whitehead & Associates initially had difficulty determining how to measure its intake department’s productivity. 

[24:15] The third discipline is keeping a compelling scorecard. Marc describes the scorecard as analogous to a scoreboard in a football game – it exists so everyone involved understands whether they are winning or losing. Diana explains that one of the most demoralizing aspects of life in the whirlwind is that you don’t know whether you can win. 

[26:31] Marc uses a whiteboard setup to motivate his teams. When employees can see their contribution to the win, they are more motivated to get through the daily whirlwind. 

[28:28] The four characteristics of a compelling scoreboard are: 1. Is it simple? 2. Can I see it easily? 3. Does it show lead and lag measures? 4. Can I tell at a glance if I’m winning? 

[28:57] The fourth tenet of 4DX is to create a cadence of accountability. This tenet is the most difficult to execute, but it is also deceptively simple. This is because it requires you to change a habit. 

[30:12] Marc Whitehead & Associates have melded the EOS and the 4DX systems to create a cadence of accountability. 4DX acted as a primer for EOS in that many of the concepts and principles are similar. Weekly accountability meetings for 4DX are comparable to Level 10 meetings in EOS. 

[32:29] Marc and Diana discuss The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling. Applying the book requires persistence and trial and error since the process is not linear. Holding people accountable always comes with a level of pushback since you are disrupting people’s whirlwinds. This is especially true for attorneys, whose schedules are very reactive. 

[35:54] You should expect that your WIGs will change over time, so they require a big-picture mindset. It can be difficult to sell the changes to people who are stuck in the daily whirlwind. Marc Whitehead & Associates builds their WIGs into their bonus structures to incentivize employees to buy into the changes. Changing the bonus structure to meet quarterly WIGs helps get employees on board.

Buy The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Disciplines-Execution-Achieving-Wildly-Important/dp/145162705X 

Visit the Successful Barrister website: https://www.successfulbarrister.com/ 

Email Marc Whitehead: marc@marcwhitehead.com