Tuesday, July 9, 2024
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my second favorite equation in life. It’s one I revisit often as a reminder to myself. I also offer it to others, from time to time, whenever someone finds themselves in one situation, but wants to move into a different one. The equation goes like this: Consistency over Time = Results or C x T = R. It’s simple, elegant and has the advantage of being true to nearly any scenario.
Too often we try to take giant swings toward radical change, only to realize soon after that we didn’t account for a major unchangeable reality in our original situation. Or perhaps we didn’t think through all of the thousands of tiny process changes necessary for ultimate success. Or perhaps we underestimated the time it would take to achieve it.
Imagination and enthusiasm are required to create a goal, then discipline and patience take over as the requirements critical for staying committed through execution. Usually by executing consistently over the actual amount of time required to fully achieve the goal, we realize results. If you do not properly manage the C or the T in the equation, you will not realize the R you desire.
For example, I used to work for someone who was terrific at bringing the management team together to imagine, declare, and commit to our company goals for the following year. It happened every Q4, and it was genuinely exciting to see where we intended to develop and grow over the next 12 months. We all arrived back at work on January 2 eager to begin realizing the Bold New Initiatives.
Yet almost every new year, a second curious thing would happen. A timeline would then be layered over the plan by the Big Boss; with due dates, project conclusions and measurements of success slated for a mere 6 to 8 weeks out. 12 weeks if we were lucky.
It didn’t matter that the goals were envisioned and agreed to under the premise of a 12-month time horizon. The management team would chuckle and chalk up the extremely condensed timeline to “trying to motivate us” and signaling that “time was of the essence.” We would begin trying to meet year long goals in the time limit of only one quarter on the calendar.
We would feverishly get to work. Executing both the current processes to keep the status quo functional while simultaneously laying the groundwork for and implementing the foundational steps required to support the Bold New Initiatives as agreed to.
Progress check-ins would be frequent during the first weeks of the year, extra points for early success were handed out. It was a competitive sprint race. Virtual medals were awarded to whoever had the highest rate of change in their area in the least amount of time.
Invariably, however, other sprinters would need to pause to handle the live fire of current operations for a bit. No medals were given for that. Sometimes other new and exciting opportunities were added into the mix, and those fruits needed harvested right away too. No medals were handed out for that.
An interesting divide would begin to emerge. Often, the early medal collectors who made the most visible changes in the quickest manner, found that their changes fell away and that their staff had inexplicably reverted to the way they did things before the Bold New Initiative became a thing. This group would dread status meetings because their early successes seemed to melt away nearly as quickly as they’d been achieved.
The second group, who tried to build up to meeting their goals with smaller, sustainable, incremental changes over time also dreaded those status meetings, because the dials on their metrics could barely be seen to budge.
Eventually the Big Boss would get distracted by a new project, or new goal, or new sale, or new problem, and would cease measuring against the Bold New Initiatives.
Our early medal collecting group would relax about their group no longer executing to most of the new goals.
Often, our slower more methodical group would keep reporting their wins toward the (no longer considered bold or new) goals during standing meetings but received little to no medals or fanfare for the accomplishments. By the end of March, December’s boldness had largely been forgotten.
The results for each character in this story are easy to predict: The Big Boss was perennially disappointed in the management team’s inability to effect meaningful change. Big Boss didn’t allow for the work to reliably accrue over time.
The Quick Sprinters weren’t able to effect sustainable change because they didn’t spend time designing or reinforcing the changes long enough for them to bake into process.
Our slower group, the consistent over time group, usually did achieve the desired results eventually, but to no fanfare. Because everyone else had moved on to the next hurdles.
Each year, it would begin all over again. And while results did occur, they often fell needlessly short of where we could have landed if this simple equation had been understood.
It’s easy to be seduced by the mirage that time can often be.
There’s a familiar saying in the tech word that goes “things that you think will take 10 years actually only take 3…and things you think should take 3 years actually require 10”. If you think about examples from your life, I’ll bet you’re nodding along. Time is often the variable in the equation that is either underestimated or misappropriated.
C x T = R is usually true for both negative and positive results.
No matter what changes you’re evaluating, be they yours or someone else’s, be they personal or professional, give yourself (and others) the gift of appreciating how important both C and T are in the equation of C x T = R.
Until Next Time,
Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC