When a culture adopts “What’s the next action?” as a standard operating query, there’s an automatic increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus.
I HAVE A personal mission to make “What’s the next action?” part of our global thought process. I envision a world in which no meeting or discussion will end, and no interaction cease, without a clear indication of whether or not some action is needed—and if it is, what it will be, or at least who has accountability for it. I envision organizations adopting a standard that anything that lands in anyone’s field of awareness will be evaluated for action required, and the resulting decisions managed appropriately. Imagine the freedom that would provide for people and organizations to focus their attention on bigger issues and opportunities.
Over the years I have noticed an extraordinary shift in energy and productivity whenever individuals and groups installed “What’s the next action?” as a fundamental and consistently asked question. As simple as the query seems, it is still somewhat rare to find it fully operational where it needs to be.
One of the greatest challenges you may encounter is that once you have gotten used to “What’s the next action?” for yourself and those around you, interacting with people who aren’t asking it can be highly frustrating. It clarifies things so quickly that dealing with people and environments that don’t use it can seem nightmarish.
We are all accountable for defining what, if anything, we are committed to make happen as we engage with others and ourselves. And at some point, for any outcome that we have an internal commitment to complete, we must make the decision about the next physical action required. There’s a great difference, however, between making that decision when things show up and doing it when they blow up.
The Source of the Technique
I learned this simple but extraordinary next-action technique more than thirty years ago from a longtime friend and management-consultant mentor of mine, Dean Acheson (no relation to the former U.S. Secretary of State). Dean had spent many prior years consulting with executives and researching what was required to free up the logjams many of them had regarding projects and situations they were involved in, in order to release and galvanize energy for significant change required in their organizations. One day he just started picking up each individual piece of paper on an executive’s desk and forcing him to decide what the very next thing was that he had to do to move it forward. The results were so immediate and so profound for the executive that Dean continued for years to perfect a methodology using that same question to process the in-tray. Since then, given what I’ve developed using Dean’s insights, hundreds of thousands of people have been trained and coached with this key concept, and it remains a foolproof technique.
This thought process is not something we are born doing, nor does it seem to come to us naturally. When you were born, it probably didn’t occur to you to ask your mother, “So, what are we doing here, and what’s the next action, and who has it?” It is a learned technique of thinking, decision making, and consciously directed focus. It will happen automatically for you when the situation obviously demands it, as in a crisis, or when the pressure in a situation (from the boss, a client, your child, or the unexpected circumstance) forces a next-action decision to avert painful consequences. But incorporating this as a proactive behavior, before the circumstances are so obvious and actions so immediately necessary, is an acquired practice.* Making it a part of your personal and organizational life never fails to improve both your productivity and peace of mind.
Creating the Option of Doing
How could something so simple be so powerful—“What’s the next action?”
To help answer that question, I invite you to revisit for a moment your mind-sweep list (see page 115)—or at least to think about all the projects that are probably sitting around in your head. Do you have a sense that any of them haven’t been moving along as consistently and productively as they could be? You’ll probably admit that yes, indeed, a few have been a little bit stuck.
If you haven’t known for sure whether you needed to make a call, send an e-mail, talk to someone, surf the Web about something, or buy an item at the store as the very next thing to move on, it hasn’t been getting done. What’s ironic is that it would likely require only about ten seconds of thinking to figure out what the next action would be for almost everything on your list. But it’s ten seconds of thinking and decision making that most people haven’t done about most things on their lists.
Shared from the Book: Getting Things Done. The art of stress free productivity.
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