paper, I have now been hamstrung to use only his or her trusted medium. That should be unacceptable behavior in any organization that cares about whether things happen with the least amount of effort.
When change is required, there must be trust that the initiatives for that change will be dealt with appropriately. Any intact system will ultimately be only as good as its weakest link, and often that Achilles' heel is a key person's dulled responsiveness to communications in the system.
I especially notice this when I walk around organizations where in-baskets are either nonexistent, or overflowing and obviously long unprocessed. These cultures usually suffer from serious 'interruptitis' because they can't trust putting communications into the system.
Where cultures do have solid systems, down through the level of paper, the clarity is palpable. It's hardly even a conscious concern, and everyone's attention is more focused. The same is true in families that have instituted in-baskets—for the parents, the children, the nanny, the housekeeper, or anyone else with whom family members frequently interact. People often grimace when I tell them that my wife, Kathryn, and I put things in each other's in-baskets, even when we're sitting within a few feet of each other; to them it seems 'cold and mechanical.' Aside from being an act of politeness intended to avoid interrupting the other's work in progress, the practice actually fosters more warmth and freedom between us, because mechanical things are being handled in the system instead of tying up our attention in the relationship.
Unfortunately, you can't legislate personal systems. Everyone must have his or her own way to deal with what he or she has to deal with. You can, however, hold people accountable for outcomes, and for tracking and managing everything that comes their way. And you can give them the information in this book. Then, at least, they'll have no excuse for letting something fall through the cracks.
Organizations must create a culture in which it is acceptable that everyone has more to do than he or she can do, and in which it is sage to renegotiate agreements about what everyone is
This doesn't mean that everyone has to do everything. I hope I have described a way to relate to our relatively new knowledge-based world that gives room for everyone to have a lot more to do than he or she
When groups of people collectively adopt the 100 percent collection standard, they have a tight ship to sail. It doesn't mean they're sailing in the right direction, or even that they're on the right ship; it just means that the one they're on, in the direction it's going, is doing that with the most efficient energy it can.
12. The Power of the Next-Action Decision
I HAVE A personal mission to make 'What's the next action?' part of the global thought process. I envision a world in which no meeting or discussion will end, and no interaction cease, without a clear determination of whether or not some action is needed— and if it is, what it will be, or at least who has responsibility for it. I envision organizations adopting a standard that anything that lands in anyone's 'ten acres' will be evaluated for action required, and the resulting decisions managed appropriately. Imagine the freedom that would allow to focus attention on bigger issues and opportunities.
Over the years I have noticed an extraordinary shift in energy and productivity whenever individuals and groups installed 'What's the next action?' as a fundamental and consistently asked question. As simple as the query seems, it is still somewhat rare to find it fully operational where it needs to be.
When a culture adopts 'What's the next action?' as a standard operating query, there's an automatic increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus.
One of the greatest challenges you may encounter is that once you have gotten used to 'What's the next action?' for yourself and those around you, interacting with people who aren't asking it can be highly frustrating. It clarifies things so quickly that dealing with people and environments that don't use it can seem nightmarish.
We are all accountable to define what, if anything, we are committed to make happen as we engage with ourselves and others. And at some point, for any outcome that we have an internal commitment to complete, we must make the decision about the next physical action required. There's a great difference, how-ever, between making that decision when things show up and doing it when they
I learned this simple but extraordinary next-action technique twenty years ago from a longtime friend and management-consulting mentor of mine, Dean Acheson (no relation to the former secretary of state). Dean had spent many prior years consulting with executives and researching what was required to free the psychic logjams of many of them about projects and situations they were involved in. One day he just started picking up each individual piece of paper on an executive's desk and forcing him to decide what the very next thing was that he had to do to move it forward. The results were so immediate and so profound for the executive that Dean continued for years to perfect a methodology using that same question to process the in-basket. Since then both of us have trained and coached thousands of people with this key concept, and it remains a foolproof technique. It never fails to greatly improve both the productivity and the peace of mind of the user to determine what the next physical action is that will move something forward.
How could something so simple be so powerful—'What's the next action?'
To help answer that question, I invite you to revisit for a moment your mind-sweep list. Or at least to think about all the projects that are probably sitting around in your psyche. Do you have a sense that they haven't been moving along as consistently and productively as they could be? You'll probably admit that yes, indeed, a few have been a little bit 'stuck.'
If you haven't known for sure whether you needed to make a call, send an e-mail, look up something, or buy an item at the store as the very next thing to move on, it hasn't been getting done. What's ironic is that it would likely require only about ten seconds of thinking to figure out what the next action would be for almost everything on your list. But it's ten seconds of thinking that most people haven't done about most things on their list.
For example, a client will have something like 'tires' on a list.
I then ask, 'What's that about?'
He responds, 'Well, I need new tires on my car.'
'So what's the next action?'
At that point the client usually wrinkles up his forehead, ponders for a few moments, and expresses his conclusion: 'Well, I need to call a tire store and get some prices.'
That's about how much time is required to decide what the 'doing' would look like on almost everything. It's just the few seconds of focused thinking that most people have not yet done about most of their stuff.
It will probably be true, too, that the person who needs tires on his car has had that on his radar for quite a while. It's also likely that he's been at a phone hundreds of times, often with enough time and/or energy only to make just such a call. Why didn't he make it? Because in that state of mind, the last thing in the world he felt like doing was considering all his projects, including getting tires, and what their next actions were. In those moments he didn't feel like thinking at all.
What he needed was to have already figured those things out. If he gets that next-action thinking done, then, when he hap-pens to have fifteen minutes before a meeting, with a phone at hand, and his energy at about 4.2 out of 10, he can look at the list of options of things to do and be delighted to see 'Call tire store for prices' on it. 'That's something I can do and complete successfully!' he'll think, and then hell actually be motivated to make the
