Three questions lie at the heart of effectiveness. The better you can answer these three key questions and act on the answers, the more effective you will be:

1. What results do I want?
2. How can I create the results I want?
3. What results am I creating?

In my coaching and consulting practice, I’ve notice that people often focus predominantly on question 2, on “what can I do.” In particular, when people are feeling stuck or ineffective, they’re likely focusing exclusively on what to do. Even more specifically, they’re likely focusing exclusively on how to carry out some previously chosen course of action.

One clue that people are overly attached to a course of action is the way they ask for help. When people ask “How can I …” or “What can I do to …” or “What’s the best way to …” in a way that suggests they have been struggling to answer the question themselves, I begin to suspect that they may be neglecting to ask the other questions: What results do I want? What results am I creating?

There’s something seductive about focusing on what to do. I’m certainly susceptible to the seduction. My story about finding the right word is an example of that. I’d been struggling to find just the right word for “the people you’re asking to change.” I’d somehow chosen finding just the right word as my goal, and didn’t know how to find just the right word. With the help of my writer friends I realized that my stuckness came largely from holding too tightly to that goal. When I changed my focus from “how can I” to “what do I want,” I quickly discovered that my deeper problem wasn’t how to find just the right word for “the people you’re asking to change,” but how to write in a gender-inclusive way. Once I understood my deeper problem, I quickly solved it.

What makes focusing on what to do so enticing? Perhaps it’s because it seems to lead directly to action, directly to resolution. And perhaps it’s because we know that we will achieve our goals only through action. And perhaps it’s because focusing on action usually works.

It’s only when focusing on action doesn’t work that people become stuck. And in those cases, focusing on what to do often leaves people even more stuck. But there’s something about being stuck that encourages people to strive even more intently to figure out what to do. A vicious circle.

And that’s when they ask me for help. So by the time people ask for help, they are often not only stuck, but also intent on figuring out how to carry out the course of action that got them stuck in the first place. I’ve learned, from my own experience and from observing other people, that if people are persisting in a course of action that isn’t working, it’s likely that either they are not staying mindful of what they want or they are not seeing clearly the results they’re creating.

This model of effectiveness is a centerpiece of my approach to coaching and consulting. One of the most helpful things I can do for clients is to ask the questions that they have been neglecting: What do you want? and What is happening?
Time after time, these questions have proven to be both simple and powerful.

What makes these questions so powerful? One key benefit of asking “what do we want” is that simply revisiting our goal often jiggles us into imagining other ways to achieve it, or at least into considering that there may be other ways to achieve it. My “just the right word” episode is an example of that.

A key benefit of asking “what is happening” is that it invites us to seek information, or to recognize that we already have information, that can help us evaluate adjust our course of action.

Here’s an example in which I persisted in a dysfunctional course of action in part because I had neglected this simple question. The story takes place one day in 1992. A group of coworkers and I had for months been gathering in the cafeteria for snacks and conversation every afternoon at around 3 o’clock. For at least two weeks I had been holding court, moaning about our ignorant manager, and his stupid manager, and his bonehead manager, all the way up to the company’s evil CEO and deranged President.

On this particular afternoon, as we finished our break and were headed back to work, my friend Jack said to me, “You really know how to bring a conversation down.”

Yikes! I immediately recognized the truth of what he’d said. And I immediately disliked that it was true. I had been so focused on complaining, on my dysfunctional course of action, that I was oblivious to the effect I was having on my friends. Jack’s comment answered a question that I had neglected to ask: What results am I creating with my complaining? I immediately vowed to stop moaning all over my friends, and I spent some time figuring out what I really wanted, and how better to achieve it.

What results do I want? How can I create the results I want? What results am I creating? I’ve used these questions countless times to improve my own performance, and to help my clients create the results they want.

The Unwritten Rule of the Unwritten Rule:

The purpose of many written rules is to justify punishing people for violating the unwritten rules.

Now that I’ve written it, I guess I’ll have to change the name.

Once upon a time, I was a professional corporate bureaucrat. Part of my job was to define policies that would directly affect thousands of people, and indirectly affect thousands more. Early in that job I learned that our company didn’t offer much guidance about writing policies. Sure, we had clear policies about the format in which we would publish policies, but no guidance about other key elements of policies, such as how to define policies, how to maintain them, and how to encourage adoption. Lacking that guidance, I created my own.

Basic Principles

• Make your policy effective
• Encourage people to adopt your policy
• Help people find policies that affect them
• Help people determine which “policies” are legitimate
• Help people understand what they are being asked to do
• Help yourself maintain your policies

Make your policy effective

1. To make your policy effective,
   identify the policy’s beneficiaries, the people who benefit from the policy.
2. To make your policy effective,
   identify the business benefit that the policy creates its beneficiaries.
3. To make your policy effective,
   construct a cause and effect model that shows how compliance creates the business benefit.
4. To determine whether your policy is effective,
   measure compliance.
5. To determine whether your policy is effective,
   measure the business effect that the policy is intended to create.
6. To determine whether your policy is effective,
   correlate the measured compliance with the measured business effect.

Encourage people to adopt your policy

1. To encourage people to adopt your policy,
   describe the policy’s beneficiaries.
2. To encourage people to adopt your policy,
   describe the business benefit that the policy creates its beneficiaries.
3. To encourage people to adopt your policy,
   describe the cause and effect model that shows how compliance creates the business benefit.

Help people find policies that affect them

1. To help people become aware of relevant policies,
   link to each policy from web pages related to the policy’s scope and purpose.
2. To help people find the policies they need,
   publish each policy where people are likely to look for it.
3. To help people find related policy information,
   list all related policies, and only related policies, in the Related Policies section.
4. To help people determine whether a policy applies to them,
   clearly describe the scope of the policy by identifying who must comply, and, if appropriate, under what conditions.
5. To help people determine whether a policy applies to them,
   put all scope information, and only scope information, in the Scope section. Put other information, such as guidance, background information, or procedures, in a separate section or a separate document.
6. To help people determine which policies apply to them, when writing scope statements, use the “one-name-one-meaning” principle: each time you refer to the same set of people, use the same name; each time you use the same name, make sure it refers to the same set of people.

Help people determine which “policies” are legitimate

1. To help people determine whether a policy is legitimate,
   identify the person who approved the policy, and identify the date on which the policy was approved.
2. To help people understand whether a policy is in effect,
   indicate each policy statement’s approval status or revision status. Examples of status include approved, draft, and pending approval.
3. To help people understand the importance of a policy,
   put the word “Policy” in the title of the policy. Similarly, when creating titles for other kinds of admonitions, such as guidelines, standards, and procedures, include a word that identifies the type of admonition. This helps the reader distinguish among the types of admonitions, and give the appropriate significance to each.
4. To help people understand whether a policy is legitimate,
   keep the policy current.
5. To keep a policy current,
   periodically review the policy to determine
   • Is the policy’s purpose still relevant to the organization?
   • Are the policy’s compliance criteria necessary and sufficient to achieve the policy’s purpose?
   • Are the names used in policy (e.g., organizations, roles, technologies) still current?
   • Are the related policies and documents referenced by the policy still current?
   • Are there other policies that overlap or conflict with this one?
6. To help people find current policies,
   periodically remove old drafts and unapproved policy candidates from publication.

Help people understand what they are being asked to do

1. To help people understand what they are being asked to do,
   put all compliance criteria, and only compliance criteria, in the Policy section. Put other information, such as guidance, background information, or procedures, in a separate section or a separate document.
2. To help people understand the relationships among policies,
   list all related policies, and only related policies, in the Related Policies section.
3. To help people find information related to a policy, when referring to policies, events, practices, or other information defined elsewhere, give full citations. A full citation includes enough information to guide the user to easily find the referenced information.
4. To help people access information related to a policy,
   give citations in a form that readers can use. Some readers will read the policy on-line. Others will want printed copies of the policy. Use hyperlinks to help on-line readers. For people reading printed copies, give full citation information in the body of the policy statement, in a way that is readable on the printed copy.
5. To help people understand a policy,
   use the “one-word-one-concept” principle: each time you refer to the same concept, use the same word; each time you use the same word, make sure it refers to the same concept.

Help yourself maintain your policies

1. To make a policy maintainable, when assigning responsibilities, use role names; do not use the names of individual people. Refer readers to an external source (maintained separately from the policy) that identifies which people currently fill each role.
2. To make a policy maintainable, when requiring the use of technologies, require the most general technology that will achieve the policy’s purpose.
3. To make a policy maintainable,
   
   refer to related documents; do not copy text into the policy from other documents.