Say you’re part of a business that involves selling directly to clients. And your goal is to grow sales by X% this year. Well, you can’t reach out and directly move the dial on how much product the company has sold. What you can do is make more sales calls. Just remember: what ultimately matters isn’t the number of calls, but the annual sales.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution calls this distinction “lead measures” vs “lag measures”. Lead measures are the ones that you can influence directly, in the short term. They tend to be relatively “instrumental“—not things you want intrinsically, so much as things you want because they help you get things you do want intrinsically. The lead measures that you choose for a given situation represent a belief you have about the best way to influence the lag measure. For the most part, you’d happily choose a different lead measure if you thought that’s what could get you closer to the goal.
Briefly, some examples that follow this pattern:
- # of pushups done is a lead measure… max # of pushups you can do is a lag measure
- caloric intake or other dietary numbers are lead measures… your weight / health is usually relatively laggy
- hours studied is a lead measure… grades are a lag measure
- number of people messaged on okcupid is a lead measure… actually getting dates or a relationship is a lag measure
- same as the previous one but for resumes and jobs
- unit tests in programming is a lead measure… having the system not crash is a lag measure
You’ll note that you can usually decide on a given day to achieve success on the lead measure, but not on the lag measure. You may also note that in each case it remains to be seen if doing lots of the former will in fact lead to the latter. If you do it poorly (or some other factor is not present) it may not work.
So these kind of lead and lag measures are one relatively concrete instance in which you need to take action on A in order to achieve B. This sort of structure shows up elsewhere, in some non-obvious places, and it has some failure modes that are worth watching out for.
Pitfall #1: Getting too attached to the lead measure & forgetting the lag measure
On a day to day basis, what’s important is the lead measure… right? I mean, it is. But only insomuch as it affects the lag measure. Which means two things:
a) if you’ve picked a bad lead measure, pick a new one
You can know if this has happened either by noticing that you’ve increased the lead measure but the lag measure hasn’t moved when you would have expected, or by more theoretical means (realizing that you no longer trust your model for why you thought the lead measure was good).
b) beware of actions that do increase the lead measure but don’t have much of an effect on the lag measure
You may have designed the lead measure with some assumptions about how it would be achieved, and those assumptions might be vital to ensuring the lead measure does indeed affect the lag measure. They might *also* be costly.
For instance, in the sales example, say you set a lead measure target of having all of the salespeople make 10 calls a day instead of 5. You reason that they’re only spending a few hours on the phone as it is, so they surely have time in their day to make more calls. This may be true… but what may end up happening is that the calls become shorter as other demands on their time pile up. These shorter calls might be much less effective at converting leads, resulting in a failure to improve the lag measure.
Pitfall #2: Confusing the lead and lag measures
So we might briefly tag this as another pitfall: confusing the lead and lag measures in such a way that you go after the lag measures directly and what you end up getting is… something else. This doesn’t show up in all cases: sometimes the lag measures are obviously not directly movable: in modern secret-ballots, for instance, you can’t really just buy the votes you want. And if you could (which, in fact, used to be standard practice!) then we might argue that you’ve kind of broken the democratic system.
Another confusion could be the opposite: you think that the lead measure is the lag measure, and you think “aha, I’ve succeeded, I’m doing NVC” (“Nonviolent Communication”, a set of practices for how to communicate) but you’ve gotten overmuch focused on the specific phrasings and you’ve forgotten the point of it, which is to connect with yourself and others in a compassionate way.
Putting it all together
The idea is to define both for your goals. Focus on the lead measures on a daily basis. During weekly and monthly reviews, assess whether you are hitting your lead measures (if not, check out the activities in the Participation module to help you out).
If you are hitting the lead measure but the lag measure isn’t moving, then you change your lead measure. The Integration module has tools and activities to help make sure you check back in to assess whether the lead measure is moving you in the right direction.