17
Meaningful Progress

The ultimate purpose of Quest-Augmented Strategy is to enable an enterprise to explore, find, validate, integrate and pursue viable strategic options that ensure its business model and identity remain viable into the future.

Meaningful progress is the antithesis of stagnation and decline.

Through meaningful progress, an enterprise maintains enduring value and relevance. And meaningful progress sees an enterprise outfox the Inevitable Kraken of Doom — by not only identifying new potential growth arcs, but also having the pioneering leadership and adaptive work culture to pursue them.

But this may still seem pretty vague and wordy. How do we really know what constitutes meaningful progress?

FINDING A SENSE OF PROGRESS

We can go about finding a sense of progress in at least two main ways.

We can easily measure progress quantitatively (with numbers).

Using this approach, we declare our objectives, establish milestones and create a visible, clear and measurable sense of progress. We see what we are striving towards, and we reverse-engineer the steps to get there. And the clearer the goal, the easier it is for progress to be measured.

I occasionally use quantified measures to track progress in my health and fitness goals. This includes an app that clearly communicates how frequently, fast and far I've run within any given period of time. Right now — at the time of writing this book — it has come to my attention that I have developed a bit of a ‘writer's physique'.^[1] And so I'm now using quantitative measures to track my nutritional goals, too.

For teams working on a mission or a specific project, tapping into a quantified sense of progress can be incredibly motivating. Seeing that you're getting closer to your target allows you to benefit from ‘the goal gradient effect' (a sensation in which our motivation and effort increases the closer we get to our goals).^[2]

The trouble is, we can get carried away with this approach. It's just too easy. The numbers can provide a clear and immediate sense of progress. They make us feel productive. We have boxes to tick, and we don't have to think so hard.

As we explored in chapter 2, this can create an insidious Delusion of Progress — a scenario in which we avoid the more challenging and ambiguous yet meaningful work, by defaulting to easy/clear tasks that provide a rich and immediate sense of progress. The stronger the goals, measures and incentives, the more likely we are to see behavioural distortion away from the more ambiguous work that matters.

And so, quantifiable measures are not the only way to obtain a sense of progress. Nor are they the most appropriate for explorative work because of the potential incoherencies nested within the inherent complexity of uncertain future contexts.

We must also review progress qualitatively (with words).

Here, we reconnect with our overarching strategic intent, and review our efforts in light of what's most important. We establish rituals and strategic rallying points, and gather together to assess what we have learned and how we are tracking. Through doing so, we learn, adapt and recalibrate to change as it emerges.

This sense of progress is grounded in shared conversations — something that should happen regularly. The only way to really ‘see' a sense of progress via qualitative inputs is to craft a time line of the evolving narrative. Short-term progress may be hard to see up close in this way — but if you zoom out to encompass a wider sense of time, great gains can be seen. ‘Remember when, this time last year at the conference, we were talking about x? I can't believe how far we've come, and how much we've learnt since then!'

Naturally, we need to get a sense of progress from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. If we are restricted to quantitative measures only, we may lose perspective on what really matters. But by only reviewing progress qualitatively, we may get caught in a spiral of introspection and reflection.

Both of these perspectives are brought to life through our rituals (see chapter 21), but two further perspectives are important in assessing meaningful progress: our areas of responsibility, and our most important projects (discussed in chapter 18).

AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY

You can measure your progress by assessing how you're progressing in all areas of responsibility. Your responsibility can be infinite, and includes all of the implicit things associated with the various roles you play.

You may think this is fairly simple, but the more you move away from a clearly defined role and into the fuzzy territory of leadership, the broader your areas of responsibility become. And that's just one role.

When you also begin to integrate the responsibilities you have from all the other roles you play in your life — partner, parent, daughter or son, and friend to different people — things start to get mighty complex. And, again, thanks to the Delusion of Progress we can find ourselves progressing towards quantified goals while the fuzzier and more implicit elements of our roles suffer. We work really hard to hit targets and numbers … while missing out on family time, neglecting to take care of our health, and/or failing to support the growth and development of our team.

I can't offer a perfect solution to this. If you're striving to achieve balance across all of these areas, however, know that this is only possible over time. Balance does not occur within any given moment. The only thing we can do to ensure we are making meaningful progress across all our areas of responsibility is to create rituals that disrupt our normal pattern of behaviour. Things that pull us out of autopilot, and give us space to reflect and review our work from a space of dissociated metacognition.

(Ah, the joys of writing a linear book. I'd love to discuss rituals right now — but they're in the final chapter. I also fear that, with the number of times I've referenced them, I may have built them up so much that, by the time you do see them, you'll be all like, ‘Meh'. And so let's preview one little thing, briefly.)

Daily journalling — especially when combined with a reflection on gratitudes — is an excellent way to safeguard against massive imbalances in your areas of responsibility. This can be as simple as investing ten minutes at the start of your day to reflect upon the day's priorities — the things that constitute meaningful progress — and how you are tracking across your areas of responsibility. By embracing a simple ritual like this, you create space for more thorough thinking, and give yourself a chance to engage in dissociated metacognition and evaluate what is most important.

PROJECTS

The alternative to areas of responsibility when assessing meaningful progress is looking at the projects that matter, and the missions we choose to undertake in order to progress important work.

An area of responsibility may seem like an infinite marathon with no finish line, but a well-designed project will have a deliverable. Therefore, it is much more like a sprint. Or a long jog.^[3] Or a marathon with a finish line.

Whereas areas of responsibility are implicit, and require an emphasis on qualitative reflection, projects are explicit, and benefit from clear quantitative measures. Projects, therefore, happen at many different levels and across many different time frames. Making lunch is a project. Reconciling the accounts for your taxes is a project. Recruiting a new executive is a project. Hosting a dinner party is a project. And so on.

In the next chapter, we explore these ideas in more detail, specifically honing in on our most important projects.