It Starts with Rocks

I borrow a concept from Stephen Covey called “Big Rocks,” a way to identify your most important strategic priorities and putting first things first. These Big Rocks differ from lesser issues, which he describes as pebbles, sand, and water. Organizations often stay busy with those smaller matters while their most important priorities receive less attention. Instead, choose three to five rocks to focus your time and talent on so that you have meaningful results to show for your efforts.

Too often, rocks are framed as problems to solve, which creates a fixation on repairing what is wrong instead of aligning efforts toward the future. It is easier to focus on what is obvious than to explore what is hidden or unknown. To address that, I use what I call the M and M framework. It combines diagnosis, discovery, and design with an intent on balance.

Two Columns

The exercise itself begins with a blank sheet of paper. Using a pencil or pen, draw a line down the center. In the left column at the top, you will write the word “Problems.” On the right, “Opportunities.”

My experience across every sector is that the problem column fills up quickly. We all see the flaws within our companies, and therefore, we can enter all of them into that field quickly. This is where the first M comes into play.

What do we do with problems? We mitigate them. For major problems, we try to stop the bleeding; for smaller ones, we apply a bandage. Solving issues is necessary, but a decision-making process focused only on what is broken can limit your ability to ask what else is possible. In that mindset, mitigation often becomes the default path forward.

But that leaves us with the “opportunities” column. What do you do there?

Finding the Gems

The “opportunities” column has an M of its own, naturally. It’s Maximize, and this is the oft-overlooked part of the equation.

Finding problems is somewhat easy. Discovering opportunities is much more difficult. These are areas where the company could grow, change, shift, pivot, or adapt in some manner. But since we’re focusing on the problems, we’re not paying as much attention to those opportunities. Instead, if we maximize them, we can determine the true goals for our organization.

Many companies don’t do this, and as a result, they leave opportunities on the table. Those ideas could be the next thing they need to vault themselves to a higher level or make it through a difficult financial period. Because opportunities are not as obvious as the problems, the company focuses on mitigation and not maximizing, then they build their rocks around them. That’s not a recipe for growth.

Building Better Rocks

When I go through the M and M exercise with my organization or even somewhere else, I often see there are rocks that are prepared and ready to go. But once we go through the M and M process, we discover there are many other rocks we could—and arguably should—focus on. Instead of aligning on the wrong things, we’re indexing on moving forward, and the results usually show that extra time and care was worth it.

The best decision-making rejects the false choice of deciding between only problems or only opportunities. Get comfortable experiencing the productive and dynamic tension between the two until you have sufficiently moved beyond merely reactionary concerns to genuinely strategic ones, your Big Rocks (and it doesn’t hurt to bring some actual M&Ms with you to the meeting, either).