Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic peers into a challenge that limits our success both professionally and personally. It’s the prenicious tendency to say the right things, but the failure to do what you say. Let’s look at how to fix this by establishing disciplined execution for true success.
Intro
As a Six Sigma Blackbelt, I’m known as the person to go to if you really want to improve your processes and performance. Throughout my career, senior leaders asked me to solve so many problems that I had to put in a requirement to protect my time and filter out the projects that were going to succeed vs. those that wouldn’t.
This requirement wasn’t a sophisticated analysis or a complex series of metrics either. It was much simpler. Whether it was the factory, supply chain, business development team, engineering, or anywhere else, I’d go to the problem area and look for just one thing: Were they doing what they said they were doing?
By this, I mean, are you following the established processes and procedures intended to ensure the consistency of your work? Guess what? If their organization needed my help, 95% of the time, they weren’t doing what they said they were doing.
I’d baseline their performance and tell them that I couldn’t do anything until they actually followed their processes. I then gave them a month to prove that they could follow them, and I’d check in weekly.
After that month, I’d make my decision. If they were following their processes, I’d help them improve. If they weren’t, I’d go back to their leadership and tell them there was nothing I could do. I can’t improve a process you aren’t following by implementing a better process that you also won’t follow. They needed to demonstrate discipline.
Disciplined Execution
Disciplined execution must occur first, regardless of the processes. That’s because the counterintuitive aspect is that, once they started following their defined processes with disciplined execution, they’d achieve 80% of the desired performance increase without me even touching the processes yet.
Think about that again… I’d do nothing but expect them to follow their processes, and when they did, their performance increased dramatically! With disciplined execution as the foundation, we can then identify and address process inefficiencies to improve the system. What we’d see then wasn’t just hitting their original goal, but achieving improvements of 200-400%.
It shouldn’t be surprising because if you aren’t following your processes, there is nothing I can do to improve them. Worse is when teams justify a lack of process discipline as being somehow Agile. As we explored in Design Like a Sailor, a lack of discipline is not agile:
One theme I run into regularly is that people assume agility does not require discipline. They want to do Agile or Scrum methodologies. They want Lean Engineering or Manufacturing. They want Six Sigma processes. Yet these require incredible discipline to achieve agility.
Agility without discipline is just chaos.
The challenge here is that we are often rewarded for our words and not held accountable for our actions. That was always the biggest failure of those Six Sigma projects. The organizations that refused to follow their processes, even after I was asked to help them, often remained ‘successful’ even after I pointed out the problems. Too often, we are successfully unsuccessful.
But why?
It all boils down to a simple challenge. Change requires understanding where you want to go to begin with. You need to provide energy to take action and have accountability to follow through. And that’s the rub. Without leadership or yourself providing direction, energy, and accountability, you can say anything you want and never have to follow through on doing what you say.
Applied to Life
As you can quickly deduce, the same concepts apply to life. A lack of discipline is also a key driver of self-inflicted misery. We often don’t hold ourselves accountable for our thoughts and actions, as we explored in Commandment 4 of How To Be Miserable:
Thou Shalt Be Unreliable
Commitments are for those who don’t have important things to distract them. Your dedication to avoiding personal and professional commitments is crucial. Have you made an appointment? Be late, or break it entirely. Signed a contract? Signatures mean nothing. Promised anything to anyone? All promises are conditional. Except the promises of others, which you must hold them to. It’s important to not only be unreliable in your actions but also in your expectations of yourself and others.
It’s easy to say the right thing, so why is it so hard to do the right thing? Ironically, often it’s because we are rewarded regardless of our actions. In personal life, we refer to this as virtue signaling, and it’s easy to post politically correct statements online, display yard signs, or add a banner to your profile picture and take no further action.
It’s a lot harder to actually break down all of these statements, think critically, and really understand how to do what you say, or even whether what you say should be done! Simply put, it’s much easier to say things than it is to do what you say. You’ll still get the dopamine reward without any of the hard work. It takes a lot of effort to look in the mirror and see if your actions align with your intentions.
Do What You Say!
In quality and compliance audits, there’s a classic saying: “Say it. Do it. Prove it.” Too often in both professional and personal life, we rarely get past the first sentence. We say a lot of things. We say the right things. We say the things our leadership or our friends want to hear. It’s that second sentence where so many things start to fall apart.
Any improvement, professionally or personally, requires direction, energy, and accountability to do what you say. It’s hard. It requires you to change. It’s easier to be successfully unsuccessful. But if you lean in and build that discipline, you’ll unlock a much better way of thinking and being, and you’ll see your performance improve beyond your imagination. Even better, when you do what you say, your mental health and your reputation with others also improves at work and in life
Say it. Do what you say. Prove it. The world will be better off for it.
More on providing that direction, energy, and proactive accountability here:
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But can’t we just add AI and fix everything? (jk)
Having created operations manuals and been on both sides of that equation, it's fascinating to observe just how different things are from how SOP suggests.