I read a fantastic blog by Elizabeth Grace Saunders at the Harvard Business Review Blog Network a couple days ago about focusing on goals rather than tactics and couldn’t help myself from thinking about how it supports and helps explain aspects of lean thinking.

The gist of the post is to not get too focused on the tactic to achieve your objective, but to run experiments and figure out which path to meet your objective will work for you. That sounds a lot like experimenting through uncertainty and the unknown to meet your objectives.

Focusing on tactics sounds a lot like focusing on implementing solutions. If you focus on getting up at 5 am to exercise before work you could let your love of snooze prevent you from meeting your exercise goals. You could spend a lot of time and effort focusing on overcoming your love of snooze, which may or may not be successful, or you could try an alternative hypothesis. How frequently do we focus on implementing standard work? Is that the only way to meet our objective?

The example from the HBR post is represented with a target condition and potential experiments to meet the objective below:

I also love the focus on understanding what will work for you. While waking up at 5 am may work great for many it doesn’t work for everyone. It certainly doesn’t work for me. Does walking the slightly less than a mile downtown for dinner and / or a drink count as exercise?