July 11, 2024 | Read Online

Avoid Dangerous Drift With My Quarterly Business Review And Reset

Apply my OAR Framework to ensure your entire team is rowing in the same direction.

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Read Time: 3 minutes.

Healthy teams step back and assess their performance every few months.

Many leaders believe they are well informed by the day-to-day.

My experience suggests that after a few months, the exact opposite is true.

Ask yourself these questions:

How has the market changed?
What themes emerged across customers?
Where did your team invest their time?
What's the last thing we automated?
When was our energy highest?
Who has stepped up?

Do you know the answers to these questions?
Or just have a sense for them?

Let's use me as an example...

My business isn't complicated. There are two of us. We write, teach, and coach. Some marketing and operations support those core activities.

I would have answered those questions confidently.

Except I would have been wrong.

I would have said, "I should double down on writing on LinkedIn because X's engagement has plummeted."

And it's true.
Engagement on LinkedIn is up 30%, while X is down 9%.

But it's also wrong.
Because I still get 400% more impressions on X.

And my actions were already adjusting to what I thought was true.

I think of this as "Directional Drift."

I didn't reset my goals.
I didn't update my process map.
I didn't reallocate my daily time blocks.

But I did ever-so-subtly lean into LinkedIn and away from X.

Stepping back to examine the numbers is a good starting point, but painting a full picture requires a couple more steps.

Here's my three-step process for determining "What's true?" about your business.

When I do this step back, I ask three key questions:

Outcomes: Did I Hit My Goals?

I prefer to frame these Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

While some people say the objectives should only be moonshots and inspirational, I find more concrete goals inspirational. And since our systems are about getting the best from the people they support, that's how I do it.

Here's an example using my OKR for building my community on X:

For the Key Results, I squint hard at

The level
The direction
The momentum

When all three line up, you get an exponential curve up and to the right.

This trifecta is rare. When the stars align, we should launch that rocket.

When they don't line up and outcomes lag, my questions get more discerning:

What surprised me the most?
Where'd we outperform? Miss badly?
Were we too aggressive? Too conservative?
Are there problems connecting key results?
Do I have enough data to draw a clear conclusion?

And perhaps most importantly:

"Did I take the actions I believed would lead to the results?"

Or said differently, "Did I keep my commitments?"

Which leads us to...

Approach: How Did I Achieve Them?

While you might use an elaborate set of process maps and SOPs in reality, for this exercise, I find I get more insight by looking at the work at the essence level.

I list the 3-7 primary activities I use to achieve that objective.

Then, I answer three questions:

Which of these activities do I have a competitive advantage in?
How much business value do these activities produce?
How much energy do I get from doing them?

Here's an example:

As I'm sure you can intuit, the ideal outcome is gaining energy doing the highest-value activities that are your competitive advantage.

When those don't line up, I use a simple rubric of Keep/Stop/Start to find opportunities to eliminate, automate, and delegate.

Reality: What's Changed?

Since we started from previously set OKRs, we started from an intentionally narrowed world of focus. This zoomed-in view runs the risk that the world has changed around us without us noticing. This last step is an invitation to zoom out.

I work top-down through similar questions, but this time through the lens of opportunities.

Are there new objectives or previously deprioritized objectives we should revisit?
Are there missing key results or new ones to add?
Are there targets for those key results that no longer make sense and need to be adjusted?
Are there new primary activities we want to commit to?
Will any of them have a 10x impact supporting the objective?
Should we do those primary activities or jump straight to automation or delegation?

Here are some new opportunities inside the same example:

I encourage you to be "swiftly exhaustive" with this exercise.

Swiftness will help you focus on meaningful opportunities.

Exhaustiveness is essential because you want the complete picture before we ruthlessly edit it later.

With a refreshed picture of "What's True?" next week, we'll focus on "What to do about it."

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What You Missed

The example in this story was wildly timed. X/Twitter has been quiet for me since Elon took over. A few posts did well, but I've had 90,000 followers since the Fall of 2022—until this week…

While not as viral, here's what you missed from me on LinkedIn:

What topic should I cover next? Remember, I take requests.

Hit reply and tell me. Your requests stay confidential.

Thank you for reading. Appreciate you!

Dave

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