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June 26, 2006

Recognizing Progress: Effects versus Results

We know the old saying, "don't confuse activity with achievement." It warns us that making an effort doesn't necessarily mean we're making progress.

But one of the problems in recognizing progress is the need to know whether the conditions being generated by activity are beneficial or not.

To do that, there first must be an awareness that benefits may be unintentional as well as intentional. And meanwhile, we might get to the benefits in a planned or unplanned way.

This quickly catalogs four kinds of outcomes:
- intentional benefits from planned activity
- intentional benefits from unplanned activity
- unintentional benefits from planned activity
- unintentional benefits from unplanned activity

But along with activity and benefits, there's a third dimension too.

In management, we have to especially notice that planned or assigned activity is a mode of change, and that the circumstances (think "environment" or "context") of the activity can also change -- independently of the activity and especially during the activity.

With two sets of changes occurring -- activity and context -- the impact of each one on the other will shape the emergent conditions that are examined when we look for "progress".

When it comes to an assessment, history has shown that some combinations of conditions are far more associated with ultimate success than are others. This is why the "profile" of the conditions is so important to detect, not just a measure of an action or event.

This is a way of saying that success is relative to circumstances, so describing the circumstances adequately is more important than anything else in understanding whether an effort is being "effective" as opposed to its being ideally conclusive. For example, in a long race, the "patient tortoise" is more successful than the "impatient hare". The progress profile includes the awareness that the race is a long one... not just that the runner is fast or slow.

Here's another similar example. Imagine a motorized walkway running from point A to point B. If we decide that "progress" is to get from one point to the other, then the following problem occurs: walking on the walkway against the direction of its flow might "net out" to going nowhere. That seems to represent no progress.

But alternatively, if one must try to get to the opposite point even if walking against the flow, then going nowhere is better than going backwards -- so in making the effort, avoiding a likely loss of ground is a benefit to the cause and must be seen as making progress.

In the latter case, the benefit is clearly an "effect" -- meaning that it is an outcome contributing to the overall desired "result" although we don't yet have that final result. And we can see that the idea of "effectiveness" is most strongly associated with the way (and the fact) that we have predefined the requirement, not the goal.

Meanwhile, the effects of an effort are not always beneficial. We'll be getting effects from any effort, but they may not all make positive contributions to the desired result, and furthermore they may even be counter-productive.

The above perspective on things yields a description of the approach we need for understanding and communicating progress:
- We identify effects;
- We rate the impact of the effect(s); and...
- We measure the result

Thus there are three kinds of achievement to observe:
- producing the right kind of effects;
- gaining more beneficial impact from the effects; and...
- getting closer to the desired final state

Superficially, this mimics the structure of organizational responsibilities:
- operations (for the right effects)
- management (for the beneficial impacts)
- executive (for the target state)

But more importantly, there should be a strategy that guides the prioritization of efforts by telling what kind of progress is most critical, giving the most bang for the buck, at different times and places. Changing operational competencies is radically different from changing targets. Changing the wrong thing can be at minimum wasteful and at most catastrophic.

Postscript:
Extensive practical analysis of this issue -- including further distinctions between "activity", "achievement", and "progress" -- is available from Eliyahu Goldratt, who developed the Theory of Constraints.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at June 26, 2006 8:02 AM

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