The Consistency Gap
Stacking Bricks
The Consistency Gap: Stacking Bricks
The instant gratification of landing a strategy, scoring a deal, wrapping up a project, or nailing a team day is borne from experiences when collective tension and density produced precious diamonds. We all know how to go hard or go home, and it feels amazing to produce something tangible that gives us that immediate high.
This approach to chasing the high of ‘just in time’ and ‘one and done’ can cause us to lose sight of the foresight and hindsight that comes from stacking bricks day after day. It's like the athlete who runs every morning for five years – you don't just build endurance; you discover strengths you never knew you had.
Somehow, consistency has been misconstrued as stale, unresponsive, and inflexible. But that's a misconception. Being consistent doesn't stifle innovation, improvement, or even pivots. It's more sophisticated than just being on time or meeting commitments; it's about consistency in practice and process. On the contrary - consistency gives you the base conditioning not to have to rely on the red flags to spur you into action.
Much of what we focus on is random—at the mercy of whoever is tasked with annual priority setting, quarterly planning, or scheduling retrospectives. These sessions either become stale and uninspiring or so progressive (new and shiny) that they feel out of context. Either way, it's like trudging through mud.
Bridging the Gap
To bridge this gap, consider committing to multiple cycles of a consistent process of planning and evaluating, working with a facilitation team that can hold the thread, rather than starting fresh every time. You need someone who is committed to listening and hosting a process that allows the team to experience emergence in action - and ensuring that every one essential to the process can fully participate (i.e. don’t try to host yourself)
In the complexity of today’s reality, the ability to predict the future is a fallacy. And, even though we can accept this intellectually, we persist in future-casting continuously, often without pausing to acknowledge, learn from, and adapt based on what’s transpired even in the last few months. As we shared in our first Mind The Gaps on Complexity, we end up starting from where we are, over and over, because we don’t practice seeing the system in action.
It’s easy to say that we learn from our past actions and assumptions, but it needs a focus on consistent practice. This practice can mitigate the tendency to jump to reactionary action (see The Reactivity Gap) and jump to conclusions. It takes discipline, and enlisting professional support helps a lot.
What’s the worst that could happen? What if you commit to 2025 being the year that you’ll hold a process long enough to see how it works – the cause and effect of big and micro-actions that are agreed upon, documented, and reflected upon?
The Right Partner
Tom Crichlow suggests working with someone who:
Understands the organisational context
Grasps temporal dependencies
Delivers a just-in-time rough version of the necessary deliverable
Iterates as needed
Having another pair of eyes, committed accompanists, and facilitators who manage the process can ensure your team stays consistent, builds bricks, learns about emergence in practice, and trusts each other to build something together.
Consistency is not about being rigid; it's about creating a foundation that allows you to innovate, improve, and pivot confidently. Stop chasing the one-and-done myth and start stacking those bricks.
Let us know what you think - we finally figured out how to turn comments on 😂