Activities vs Outcomes

I’ve written a few times now about the importance of clearly defining success for any given change, whether it’s a technology implementation or a leadership development program or anything in between. After all, you have to know where you’re going in order to craft a good roadmap on how to get there, right?

But success has to be defined in a meaningful way, and one of the most common pitfalls I see when it comes to this process is a definition of success that is based on ACTIVITIES instead of OUTCOMES.

A few months ago I was conducting a current state assessment for a client who wanted to make some changes in operations. As I asked stakeholders what they felt was already working well, the most common response I was getting was “safety”. Now I knew that leadership was actually concerned about safety and the frequency of accidents and injuries was headed in the wrong direction, so I dug into this a bit deeper and asked the stakeholders I was interviewing WHY they felt like safety was going well. The answers I got were all activity based — among other things, leadership had invested in a lot of training and a new model for providing constructive feedback to employees who had a safety violation — but the actual safety results weren’t so great.

This one example highlights a number of problems that can result from an activity-based definition of success. For one, because the operations managers saw a lot of ACTIVITY around safety, they felt it was going well. Since it was going well, the logical conclusion was that they didn’t need to focus on it. Because they weren’t focused on it, the safety OUTCOMES were actually getting worse. Because the results were getting worse, the corporate safety team kept introducing more activities aimed at improving safety. It was a vicious cycle.

For another, you can actually invest a lot of time and energy in activities without making any real progress towards an outcome. It’s why a meeting isn’t an accomplishment — the progress that results from the meeting is what’s important — yet I see meetings listed as accomplishments on project status reports all of the time. Generally, these projects aren’t in great shape, partly because they are focused on activities, like meetings and “good conversations”, instead of measurable outcomes.

Another problem that the safety example highlights, and that happens all too frequently, is that leadership was not aligned with their managers on what exactly defined success. Here the managers thought that things were going really well, because they were looking at activities, while their leadership was concerned because they were looking at outcomes. In order to get the safety results back to where they needed to be, we first had to work together as a team to define what success really looked like in terms of results.

It seems so simple, but it’s a critical step that often gets skipped because people assume that they are all defining success the same way. Projects can progress for months, or even years, without a commonly accepted, clear definition of success and it’s a very painful way for you and your team to operate. Even worse, it’s unnecessary pain.

So, next time you approach a change, take the time to sit down and define success in a way that is clear, meaningful, and commonly understood. Focus on the OUTCOMES, not on the activities. Know where you’re going, and make sure your team is aligned. The journey will be that much smoother when you all agree on the destination.