Focus on fewer goals by asking "What's going on?"

Many leadership thinkers say you should focus on fewer things to achieve optimal results.

But how do we actually go about cutting the "other" things to focus on the few essential things? There's so much that must be done, after all!

While there are many reasons why it's hard to focus on fewer goals, one important reason is our lack of understanding of the current situation.

Removing caffeine, sleeping better, and feeling more energetic

Caffeine is a stimulant; its job is to make us feel, well, stimulated.

Like many of us working in tech, I drank coffee daily.

I was having plenty of caffeine, so I should have been plenty stimulated! But then why did I sometimes feel tired and lethargic?

I was eating well, dedicating plenty of time to sleep, and exercising. I couldn't find any more areas of improvement there.

I read much about caffeine and coffee's impact on our sleep, particularly from Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep. I also knew from Michael Pollan's audiobook Caffeine that nobody at Matthew Walker's LA Sleep Institute drank coffee.

So I decided to test being virtually without caffeine for 30 days – drinking decaf.

Honestly, I didn't see much change in being without caffeine in the first few weeks, which is another reason I encourage 30-day experiments.

But by the end of the 30 days, the change was tangible:

• I woke up energetic instead of slowly, jumping out of bed
• I no longer had a big dip of energy after lunch
• I quickly fell asleep when I went to bed
• I woke up less often in the middle of the night

In my anecdotal experience, the list above is rare among all coffee drinkers.

In any case, going without coffee was a great way to feel more energetic during the day.

So the answer to "What's going on with my daily energy levels?" turned out to be that coffee was interfering with the quality of my sleep, which was interfering with my daily energy.

No amount of focusing elsewhere would have solved that problem.

Just as I diagnosed my energy levels by evaluating my caffeine intake, the same principle can be applied when setting our life and work goals.

"What is going on?" – Creating strategic diagnosis

We often have high-level goals: for your company, it can be to achieve a particular revenue threshold or launch a specific product; for you, it can be to lose weight, get stronger, or read more.

After defining the high-level goal, there must be a strategic diagnosis: What is your understanding of the situation? What's preventing you from achieving the goal?

Richard Rumelt talks about this in his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy, where I got the "What's going on?" question from:

THE DIAGNOSIS

[..] we were chatting about pedagogy and I noted that many of the lessons learned in a strategy course come in the form of the questions asked as study assignments and asked in class. These questions distill decades of experience about useful things to think about in exploring complex situations. John gave me a sidelong look and said, “It looks to me as if there is really only one question you are asking in each case. That question is ‘What’s going on here?’ ”

John’s comment was something I had never heard said explicitly, but it was instantly and obviously correct. A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

At a minimum, a diagnosis names or classifies the situation, linking facts into patterns and suggesting that more attention be paid to some issues and less to others. An especially insightful diagnosis can transform one’s view of the situation, bringing a radically different perspective to bear.

Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (pp. 78-79). Crown. Kindle Edition.

Most of the time, when we have too many things to focus on, we lack a correct diagnosis. We lack a clear answer to the "What's going on?" question.

Without a clear answer to what's going on, we have no choice but to try everything we can.

The power of a correct diagnosis

To do fewer things, we must have a concise and correct diagnosis.

The diagnosis is the key to the answer. Diagnosis is the answer to your million-dollar question.

Without a diagnosis, we're just fumbling around trying various innocuous ideas.

Like a doctor who has to resort to high-spectrum antibiotics to handle an infection he doesn't precisely understand, we often take "high-spectrum actions" because we don't know what type of problem we face. The progress is slow.

But when you have a correct diagnosis, the effects feel magical: suddenly the patient feels better, the gym training gets easier, the team starts making tangible progress toward the revenue goal, etc.

If you don't know the "magical answer" to your problem and lack the correct diagnosis, having fewer goals will not help you. It may even hurt you. Who knows?

If you don't have the right key, no amount of effort will open the door. Having fewer keys won't help you if they are all wrong.

To have fewer goals, they must be the right goals.

And to have the right goals, you must have a correct diagnosis.

The 3 requirements for a correct strategic diagnosis

Diagnosis is hard. The TV show House is fun because there's this mystery of what's the diagnosis throughout the show until the team finally nails it, and the mystery is solved.

In your goals, you must also solve the mystery: what is the diagnosis?

There are three critical requirements to arriving at the correct diagnosis.

1) Expertise: Are you and your team experts in the subject matter? Are you counting on the best literature related to the problem?

2) Time allocation: Are you spending the necessary amount of work on the diagnosis? Do you gather data, analyze, discuss, make assumptions, and test them before you arrive at a diagnosis?

3) Verification: How quickly can you confirm your correct diagnosis? How surely are you that your diagnosis is accurate when it's verified?

It's hard to arrive at the correct diagnosis without expertise, time allocation, and verification. Without them, you can't have fewer goals.

So, think about an area you're trying to improve:

• Maybe you're trying to lose weight
• Maybe you're trying to read more
• Maybe you want your team to be more efficient
• Maybe you want to hit your revenue goals this quarter

The first question you must answer is "What's going on?" – what's the diagnosis?

Why are you not losing weight? Why are you not reading more?

Why is your team inefficient? Why is your quarterly revenue goal at risk?

What's going on?

Then, evaluate expertise, time allocation, and verification.

For example, if you were trying to lose weight:

1) Expertise: Consult with a nutritionist, read a book and do a course in nutrition, reach out to friends who effectively lost and kept their weight, and talk to them.

2) Time allocation: Make it a big deal. Start writing down what you're eating. Take pictures of what you eat. Journal about times when you eat well and not well. Invest in learning the problem.

3) Verification: Maybe it's 30-day or 60-day experiments. Define what you measure them by, either less weight or change in your waist. Improve your diagnosis if, after 30 days, the results are different from what you expected.

That's the work. That's how you arrive at the correct diagnosis.

Immediately having a goal of "eating more fruits" or "eating fewer sweets" won't help you unless you guess it correctly. But with the above process, you'll get closer and closer to the truth.

So before setting your strategic goals or just cutting your existing goals because you believe there are too many, ask yourself: 'What's going on?' Remember, it's not about having fewer keys but about having the right one.

Find the correct diagnosis, then set the few goals that will lead you to outstanding results.