GET MORE DONE IN 12 WEEKS THAN
OTHERS DO IN 12 MONTHS
Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington
This write up does not go into all the details of the 12 Week Year process. It is
intended to make you think about the overall concepts.
The 12 Week Year starts with a vision and from that vision you establish a set of
12 week goals. Based on those goals you develop a 12 week plan. Then comes
the process.
How would your life change if each and every day you performed up to your full
potential? “It’s not what you know; it’s not even who you know; it’s what you
implement that counts.” The authors wrote in the The 12 Week Year to close the
execution gap.
One of the things that gets in the way of individuals and organizations achieving
their best is the annual planning process. As strange as this is going to sound,
annual goals and plans are often a barrier to high performance. The authors
state, “We have found that this annual process inherently limits performance.”
The trap is what the authors call annualized thinking.
In annualized thinking, we lack a sense of urgency – not realizing that every week
is important, every day is important, and every moment is important. Ultimately,
effective execution happens daily and weekly. Stop thinking in terms of a year.
Instead, focus on shorter time-frames. “There’s nothing like a deadline to get you
motivated.”
The 12 Week Year is a structured approach that fundamentally changes the way
you think and act. It’s important to understand that the results you achieve are a
direct by-product of the actions you take. Your actions, in turn, are manifestations
of your underlying thinking. Ultimately, it is your thinking that drives your results
1and it is your thinking that creates your experiences in life. Breakthrough results
don’t start with your actions, they are first created in your thinking.
12 Weeks Equals A Year: Forget about a year. Now, there is just a 12 Week
Year, followed by the next 12 Week Year, ad infinitum. Each 12-week period
stands on its own—it is your year. The year-end push to hit your goals now
happens not once every 12 months, but all the time.
The great thing about having a 12 Week Year is that the deadline is always
near enough that you never lose sight of it. It provides a time horizon that is
long enough to get things done, yet short enough to create a sense of
urgency and a bias for actions. Every 12 weeks you take a break, celebrate,
and reload.
The Emotional Connection: The authors have found from their experience that to
execute successfully it is essential to have a strong emotional stake in the
outcome. Without a compelling reason to choose otherwise, most people will
take comfortable actions over uncomfortable ones. The issue is that the
important actions are often uncomfortable.
Therefore, the critical first step to executing well is creating and maintaining a
compelling vision of the future so that you want that vision even more than
you crave your own short-term comfort. You then align your shorter term
goals and plans with that long-term vision.
If you are going to perform at a high level, you will need a vision of the future
that is bigger than the present. You must find a vision with which you are
emotionally connected. Vision is the starting point of all high performance. You
create things twice; first mentally, and then physically.
Visualize what you want your life to look like in the future. After that is
established, we move on to what your business needs to look like in order to
align with and enable your personal vision. The more personally compelling your
2vision is, the more likely it is that you will act upon it. It is your personal vision that
creates an emotional connection to the daily actions that need to take place in
your business. Your business objectives are not the end in themselves, but the
means to an end. Once you understand the linkage between your life vision and
your business success, you can define exactly what level of income or production
your business must deliver in order to support your complete vision.
Throw Out The Annual Plan: With a 12 week plan, predictability is much greater.
You can define, with a high degree of certainty, what actions you need to
implement each week over the next 12 weeks. Twelve week plans are both
numbers—and activity—based. They create a strong connection between the
actions you take today and the results you want to achieve. 12 week planning is
more focused.
With the 12 week year, the approach is to be great at a few things instead of
mediocre at many things. In 12 week planning, you identify the top one to three
things that will have the greatest impact, and pursue those with intensity. The 12
week plan focuses on a few key areas and creates the energy and urgency to act.
Your plan should start by identifying your overall goal(s) for the 12 weeks. Once
you have established your 12 week goals, tactics will then need to be determined.
Tactics are the daily to-do’s that drive the attainment of your goals. Tactics must be
specific, actionable, and include due dates and assigned responsibilities.
One Week At A Time: “The greatest predictor of your future, are your daily
actions.” Your current actions are creating your future. If you want to know
what your future holds, look at your actions.
The weekly plan is not a glorified to-do list. Rather, it reflects the critical
strategic activity from your 12 week plan that needs to take place this week in
order for you to achieve your goals. The first five minutes of each day should
3be spent reviewing your weekly plan to plan that day’s activities.
CONFRONTING THE TRUTH: The only way to know if you are achieving is
through measurements. Scorekeeping functions as a reality check, providing
performance feedback and insight in your effectiveness. Edward Deming says,
“In God we trust; all others must bring data.” Measurement drives the execution
process. It is the anchor of reality.
Effective measurement captures both lead and lag indications that provide
comprehensive feedback. Lag indications are things like income, sales,
commission dollars, pounds lost, etc. Lead indicators are the activities that
produce the end results—for instance the number of sales calls, or referrals are
lead indicators in the sales process. Most companies and individuals effectively
measure lag indicators, but many tend to disregard lead indicators. An effective
measurement system will have a combination of complementary lead and lag
indicators.
The most important lead indicator you have is a measure of your execution.
Ultimately you have greater control over your actions than over your results. Your
results are created by your actions. An execution measure indicates whether you
did the things you said were most important to achieving your goals. For each
goal, you developed actions or tactics that describe the steps you must take to
achieve your goals.
If you are not hitting your goal, you need to know whether it is due to a flaw in
plan content or in execution.
Weekly Scorecard: The best way to measure your execution is to work from a
weekly plan and evaluate the percentage of tactics completed. With the
weekly scorecard you measure execution, not results. The authors have found
that if you successfully complete 85% of the activities in your weekly plan, you
will most likely achieve your objectives.
4INTENTIONALITY: The reality is that if you are not purposeful about how you
spend your time, then you leave your results to chance. Our results are created
by our actions. To realize your potential, you must learn to be more mindful
about how you spend your time. When you spend your time with intention, you
know when to say yes and when to say no. When you use your time
intentionally, you waste less of it and spend more of it on your high-value
actions. Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants.
The question is: “What are we busy about?”
ACCOUNTABILITY AS OWNERSHIP: Accountability is perhaps the most
misunderstood concept in business and life. Most people equate it with bad
behavior, poor performance, and negative consequences. People often talk
about holding others accountable, especially in business situations.
Accountability is not a consequence, it’s ownership. When you understand that
true accountability is about choice and taking ownership of your choices,
everything changes. You move from resistance to empowerment from limits to
possibilities, and from mediocrity to greatness. At the end of the day, the only
accountability that truly exists is self-accountability. The only person who can
hold you accountable for anything is you. And to be successful, you must
develop the mental honesty and courage to own your thinking, actions, and
results.
INTEREST VERSUS COMMITMENT: Ability to make and keep commitments
improves results, builds trust, and fosters high-performance teams. To be truly
great at what we do, we have to become better at keeping our promises.
A commitment is a personal promise. Keeping your promises to others builds
trust and strong relationships and keeping promises to yourself builds
character, esteem , and success.
5Four Keys to Successful Commitments:
1. Strong desire: In order to fully commit to something you need a
clear and personally compelling reason. The desired end result needs to be
meaningful enough to get you through the hard times and keep you on track.
2. Keystone Actions: Once you have an intense desire to accomplish
something, you then need to identify the core actions that produce the result
you’re after—It’s what we do that counts.
3. Count the Costs: Commitments require sacrifice. Costs can
include time, money, risk, uncertainty, loss of comfort, and so on. Identifying
the costs before you commit allows you to consciously choose whether you
are willing to pay the price of your commitment.
4. Act on Commitments, Not Feelings: Learning to do the things you need to
do, regardless of how you feel, is a core discipline for success.
INTENTIONAL IMBALANCE: Life balance is not about equal time in each area.
Life balance is more about intentional imbalance. Life balance is achieved when
you are purposeful about how and where you spend your time, energy, and effort.
THE EXECUTION SYSTEM: There are eight elements that are fundamental to
high performance in any endeavor: Vision, Planning, Process Control,
Measurement, Time Use, Accountability, Commitment, and Greatness in the
Moment. The eight elements break down into three principles and five disciplines.
6The Three Principles:
1. Accountability
2. Commitment
3. Greatness in the Moment
Accountability: is ultimate ownership. It is a character trait, a willingness to own
actions and results regardless of the circumstance. The ultimate aim of
accountability is to continually ask one’s self, “What more can I do to get the
result?”
Commitment: is a personal promise that you make to yourself. Commitment and
accountability go hand–in-glove. In a sense, commitment is accountability
projected into the future. It is ownership of future action or result.
Greatness in the Moment: It happens in an instant – the moment you choose to
do the things you need to do to be great, and each moment that you continue to
choose to do those things.
The three principles—accountability, commitment, and greatness in the
moment—form the foundation of personal and professional success.
Five Disciplines: The authors have found that top performers are great – not
because their ideas are better, but because their execution disciplines are
better.
7The Five Disciplines are:
1. Vision
2. Planning
3. Process Control
4. Measurement
5. Time Use
Vision: A compelling vision creates a clear picture of the future. It is critical that
your business vision aligns with and enables your personal vision. The best
visions are big ones.
Planning: An effective plan clarifies and focuses on the priority initiatives and
actions needed to achieve the vision. A plan increases your odds of success.
One of the most powerful things you can do is to create and create a written
plan. Your plan triggers your actions. In 12 weeks, you only focus on the
minimum number of actions that are most important to hit your goal. The best
plans are focused on one or two things that you want to make progress on in the
next 12 weeks. The fewer goals and weekly actions there are, the easier the plan
will be to execute.
Process Control: Process control consists of a set of tools and events that align
with your daily actions with the critical actions in your plan. These tools and events
ensure that more of your time is spent on strategic and money-making activities. A
weekly plan focuses on your week. It is the game plan for each week. The weekly
plan is not a glorified to-do list – rather it reflects the critical strategic activities that
need to take place that week to achieve your goals. Commitment in place of
will-power. The most effective process is Don’t Go It Alone. Your chances of
success are seven times greater if you employ peer support.
Measurement: Measurement drives the process. It is the anchor of reality.
Effective measurement combines both lead and lag indicators. In general, the
more frequent a measure is, the more useful it is. The most effective lead
indicator you can have is a measure of your weekly execution and it is critical that
you do so. A thinking shift is to focus more on actions than results. Your
outcomes are driven by your actions. A weekly scorecard is the most accurate
predictor of your future. So the process is less about the end result and more
about the daily actions. That is why the scorecard only measures your execution
and not your results.
Time Use: Everything happens in the context of time. If you are not in control of
your time, then you are not in control of your results. Using your time with clear
intention is a must. In fact, what most often keeps you from being exceptional is
not a lack of time, but the way you allocate the time that you have. The choices
that you make on how you spend your time ultimately create your results in life.
You need to guard your time intensely, delegating or eliminating everything
possible that is not one of your strengths or does not help you advance your
goals.
