Begin With an End in Mind

Though former in-plant manager and consultant Ray Chambers passed away in 2023, his sage advice remains invaluable for his in-plant peers. Here is a column he wrote for IPI in 2010.

I’ve never been a big fan of Steven Covey (the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), but he got it right on this one. How many times have you heard something like this at a conference or read it on an electronic forum:

“Help! My boss wants me to (fill in appropriate assignment) and I don’t know where to start. Has anyone had to do this? Could you share what you did? I don’t want to reinvent the wheel!”

The assignment could be anything from creating a strategic plan to justifying a piece of equipment to conducting a customer satisfaction survey to increase revenues. Whatever the topic, you’re not sure where to start, so you look for help from colleagues. Nothing wrong with that.

Well, actually there is something wrong with that. Beginning with an end in mind was one of Covey’s seven habits of successful people. His point was that you need to have a good idea about what you want your future to look like in order to chart a path to get there. It’s not enough to want to create a strategic plan or survey your customers; you need a reason as well.

Covey’s abstraction is aimed at the 50,000-foot view, to be sure, but it is just as applicable at the operational level. Let’s say your assignment is to conduct a customer survey. You could begin by looking at what others have done and cherry pick parts that sound good to you, but will that get you what you want? Probably not. Why? Because you haven’t made the basic decision of what you want your customers to tell you, and you have to decide that before you can decide how to approach it.

First you need to ask yourself some basic questions.

• Why do you want to survey customers?
• What do you hope to learn?
• Who will you survey?

And different goals require different survey tools. If you want to know what your current customers think about your shop, ask current customers. But if you want to understand the attitudes of people that don’t use your shop, you have to take a different approach—one that reaches noncustomers.

The same holds true for just about any project or initiative. If there is talk in your organization about outsourcing print work, a good defense might be to understand why outsourcing is being considered and use that to focus your response. If your goal is to stay open for the sake of staying open, you might not get very far. But if your goal is to contribute to the strategic purpose of the organization, that’s a different story.

You need to understand what the outcome will look like before you can figure out how to get there. Beginning with an end in mind means thinking about what you want to accomplish before you take the first step.