The Power of the Next-Action Decision

We are all accountable to define what, if anything, we are committed to make happen as we engage with ourselves and others. 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

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I learned this simple but extraordinary next-action technique twenty years ago from a longtime friend and management-consulting mentor of mine, Dean Acheson (no relation to the former secretary of state). Dean had spent many prior years consulting with executives and researching what was required to free the psychic logjams of many of them about projects and situations they were involved in. 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-basket. Since then both of us have trained and coached thousands of people with this key concept, and it remains a foolproof technique. It never fails to greatly improve both the productivity and the peace of mind of the user to determine what the next physical action is that will move something forward.

Creating the Option of Doing

If you haven't known for sure whether you needed to make a call, send an e-mail, look up 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 that most people haven't done about most things on their list.

For example, a client will have something like "tires" on a list.

He responds, "Well, I need new tires on my car."At that point the client usually wrinkles up his forehead, ponders for a few moments, and expresses his conclusion: "Well, I need to call a tire store and get some prices."That's about how much time is required to decide what the "doing" would look like on almost everything. It's just the few seconds of focused thinking that most people have not yet done about most of their stuff.

What he needed was to have already figured those things out. If he gets that next-action thinking done, then, when he happens to have fifteen minutes before a meeting, with a phone at hand, and his energy at about 4.2 out of 10, he can look at the list of options of things to do and be delighted to see "Call tire store for prices" on it. "That's something I can do and complete successfully!" he'll think, and then he'll actually be motivated to make the call, just to experience the "win" of completing something useful in the time and energy window he's in. In this context he'd be incapable of starting a large proposal draft for a client, but he has sufficient resources for punching phone numbers and getting simple information quickly. It's highly probable that at some point soon he'll look at the new set of tires on his car and feel on top of the world.

Defining what real doing looks like, on the most basic level, and organizing placeholder reminders that we can trust, are master keys to productivity enhancement.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

These are learnable techniques, and ones that we can continue to get better at.

"Uh, I need to take the car to the garage. Oh, yeah, I need to find out if the garage can take it. I guess I need to call the garage and make the appointment."And that's often what happens with so many things for so many people. We glance at the project, and some part of us thinks, "I don't quite have all the pieces between here and there." We know something is missing, but we're not sure what it is exactly, so we quit.

Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality and what you need to do.

"I need to get the number. I guess I could get it from Fred.""I have Fred's number!"

So the next action really is "Call Fred for the number of the garage."Why Bright People Procrastinate the Most Bright people have the capability of freaking out faster and more dramatically than anyone else.

If you played along with me, you probably noticed that the saliva content in your mouth increased at least a bit. Your body was actually trying to process citric acid! And it was just in your mind.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Ceasing negative imaging will always cause your energy to increase.

Intelligent Dumbing Down

There is another solution: intelligently dumbing down your brain by figuring out the next action. You'll invariably feel a relieving of pressure about anything you have a commitment to change or do, when you decide on the very next physical action required to move it forward. Nothing, essentially, will change in the world. But shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completeable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation. If you truly captured all the things that have your attention during the mind-sweep, go through the list again now and decide on the single very next action to take on every one of them. Notice what happens to your energy.

No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step toward solution. Do something.

You are either attracted or repelled by the things on your lists; there isn't any neutral territory. You are either positively drawn toward completing the action or reluctant to think about what it is and resistant to getting involved in it. Often it's simply the next-action decision that makes the difference between the two extremes.

In following up with people who have taken my seminars or been coached by my colleagues or me, I've discovered that one of the subtler ways many of them fall off the wagon is in letting their action lists grow back into lists of tasks or subprojects instead of discrete next actions. They're still ahead of most people because they're actually writing things down, but they often find themselves stuck, and procrastinating, because they've allowed their action lists to harbor items like:"Meeting with the banquet committee""Johnny's birthday"

"Receptionist"

"Slide presentation"

In other words, things have morphed back into "stuff"-ness instead of staying at the action level. There are no clear next actions here, and anyone keeping a list filled with items like this would send his or her brain into overload every time he/she looked at it.

You can only cure retail but you can prevent wholesale.

Avoiding action decisions until the pressure of the last minute creates huge inefficiencies and unnecessary stress.

That may sound exaggerated, but when I ask groups of people to estimate when most of the action decisions are made in their companies, with few exceptions they say, "When things blow up." One global corporate client surveyed its population about sources of stress in its culture, and the number one complaint was the last-minute crisis work consistently promoted by team leaders who failed to make appropriate decisions on the front end.

The Value of a Next-Action Decision-Making Standard Clarity

Too many discussions end with only a vague sense that people know what they have decided and are going to do. But without a clear conclusion that there is a next action, much less what it is or who's got it, more often than not a lot of "stuff" gets left up in the air.

Talk does not cook rice.

Accountability

The way I see it, what's truly impolite is allowing people to walk away from discussions unclear. Real "togetherness" of a group is reflected by the responsibility that all take for defining the real things to do and the specific people assigned to do them, so everyone is freed of the angst of still-undecided actions.

Productivity

Organizations naturally become more productive when they model and train front-end next-action decision-making. For all the reasons mentioned above, determining the required physical allocation of resources necessary to make something happen as soon as the outcome has been clarified will produce more results sooner, and with less effort.

There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

One of the biggest productivity leaks I have seen in some organizations is the lack of next actions determined for "long-term" projects. "Long-term" does not mean "Someday/Maybe."Those projects with distant goal lines are still to be done as soon as possible; "long-term" simply means, "more action steps until it's done," not "no need to decide next actions because the day of reckoning is so far away." When every project and open loop in an organization is being monitored, it's a whole new ball game.

Productivity will improve only when individuals increase their operational responsiveness. And in knowledge work, that means clarifying actions on the front end instead of the back.

Empowerment

Perhaps the greatest benefit of adopting the next-action approach is that it dramatically increases your ability to make things happen, with a concomitant rise in your self-esteem and constructive outlook.

People are constantly doing things, but usually only when they have to, under fire from themselves or others. They get no sense of winning, or of being in control, or of cooperating among themselves and with their world. People are starving for those experiences.

The daily behaviors that define the things that are incomplete and the moves that are needed to complete them must change. Getting things going of your own accord, before you're forced to by external pressure and internal stress, builds a firm foundation of self-worth that will spread into every aspect of your life. You are the captain of your own ship; the more you act from that perspective, the better things will go for you.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

Although my colleagues and I rarely promote our work in this way, I notice people really empowering themselves every day as we coach them in applying the next-action technique. The light in their eyes and the lightness in their step increase, and a positive spark shows up in their thinking and demeanor. We are all already powerful, but deciding on and effectively managing the physical actions required to move things forward seems to exercise that power in ways that call forward the more positive aspects of our nature.

When you start to make things happen, you really begin to believe that you can make things happen. And that makes things happen.