Learning Center / The Foundations

Course 1 · Lesson 3 of 5

Finding yours

Ask a person to list the outcomes they are responsible for and the answer is usually short and wrong. It is short because memory keeps tasks, not states. It is wrong because the outcomes that matter most are the ones that have been running quietly for years without being written down anywhere.

Do not try to remember. Look in three places instead.

Source one: what the diary keeps forcing

Open a calendar and look at the last three months. Not the meetings, the repetitions: the same kind of entry returning on its own. A rent statement going out on the first. A review scheduled every quarter. A reminder that a registration expires in March. A stock count on the last Friday of the month.

Anything that comes round again is evidence of an outcome, even if nobody has ever named it. The calendar is a fossil record of obligations that somebody, at some point, decided had to keep being true.

Two things to note as you read. A repeating entry with no date attached is an outcome that has no finish line. A repeated entry for something that stopped mattering a year ago is an outcome that has quietly become a chore.

Source two: what would embarrass you

Think about what would be genuinely embarrassing to have let lapse, and who would notice.

A landlord knows the answer immediately: an expired gas safety certificate, a deposit not protected within the thirty day window, a boiler nobody serviced. A restaurant knows: a food hygiene rating dropping, an alcohol licence lapsing, an allergen sheet out of date. A student knows: a deadline missed without a word to the tutor.

Most people hold a short list of outcomes that are kept alive purely by memory and mild anxiety. Those are the ones with the worst failure mode, because they fail silently and are discovered by somebody else.

Source three: what already went wrong

This is the most reliable source, and the least pleasant. Take last year and list the things that went wrong that should not have: the filing that went in late, the renewal that was discovered two days before it lapsed, the invoice that was never sent, the client who went quiet and was forgotten for five months.

Each of those is an outcome that was real, was somebody's, and had never been stated clearly enough to be held. A failure is evidence of a missing name.

Turning the evidence into a list

Write each finding on its own line. Do not tidy the wording yet, and do not group anything. A market trader will end up with a line about the pitch rent, a line about the hygiene certificate, a line about the supplier payment terms, a line about the public liability cover for the stall, and a line about Saturday's takings. Five lines, all real, none of them previously written down.

Then sort them by one question: if this lapsed, how quickly would it hurt? That ordering is rough and honest, and it is the correct place to start, because the outcomes that hurt fastest are the ones worth naming properly first.

One warning

Do not list the outcomes of an organisation, a team, or a role. List yours. The unit is a person, because responsibility only ever lands on a person. A list of forty departmental outcomes will sit in a drawer. A list of six sentences that a person has to answer for will get used.