The Only Reason Why You’re Not Getting Results

Posted by on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 · 3 Comments 

My wife and I were working on our monthly budget last night and were looking at where we could free up some dough so we could put more money aside for un-expected stuff, debt, vacations and so on.

Seems like every once in while we talk about the same ideas for managing our budget without anything coming of those discussions.  Sound familiar?  How often in your personal life or work life do you have the same conversations over and over again only to never realize the benefit?  What’s the problem?

Discipline.  For us, there just hasn’t been any sense of urgency to change anything about how we manage our finances.  We know we “should” do something differently but we’re not disciplined about executing on it.

What I often hear from teams is that ‘we have no time’ to do our improvements.  There is just too much work to get done.  Bullshit I say.  What they are really saying is we haven’t made improving a priority.  Discipline is really, really tough.  It forces organizations and teams to prioritize and make real decisions instead of simply deciding not to decide.

A colleague I used to work with brought this phrase to my attention. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting. If you want your outcome to change, change your behavior and be disciplined with your approach.  If you choose not to behave differently and use “no time” as the excuse for not being disciplined the only results you’re likely to get are metrics that mean absolutely nothing.

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  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/derekmahlitz Derek Mahlitz

    Good article and I like the phrase a lot

  • http://www.3PVantage.com Gil Broza

    Re “If you want your outcome to change, change your behavior and be disciplined with your approach”…

    That’s like saying “if you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more.” Patently true, but rarely enough of an impetus to actually cause a change. Since all behaviours stem from motivators, I’d offer that perhaps the *motivation* isn’t quite there. A team either doesn’t feel the desire to benefit from improving, or doesn’t feel the or-else pressure. Same with the monthly discipline to manage your budget. It’s not valuable enough, or doesn’t hurt enough.

    So you can work with the team at the level of motivation, or even at a lower conceptual level of beliefs. Both of these will get behavioural changes.

  • Jason

    @Gil, I agree simply stating “change your behaviour” isn’t going to be enough of a foreign element to influence change however I was really referring to a phenomenon I see whereas organizations are aware they need to work differently yet instead choose to not change how they behave. All the while their message is “why isn’t Agile working?”

    The pressure to ‘get stuff done’ is the vacuum pulling on the team and organization to stay in status quo.

    I agree completely about how to go about influencing behaviour changes, this post was more about organizations that don’t like the outcome they’re getting from Agile while not making it a priority to give teams time to implement improvements under a mask of time pressure to deliver anything. Sometimes teams can’t find the courage to say no and just do it.

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