Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
A deviation only tells us something when there is a consistent baseline against which to recognise it. Before trying to correct what has gone wrong, it is worth asking whether a reliable standard, rhythm or way of working ever existed in the first place.
Dr Howard Luks wrote recently about the routines that shape his life.
He goes to bed and wakes at roughly the same times, exercises consistently, eats many of the same foods daily and rarely drinks alcohol.
Much of what supports his health has become deliberately boring.
What interested me was his distinction between the routine and the exceptions. Travel, late nights, great meals and missed workouts all happen, but they are deviations from a consistent baseline rather than the baseline itself.
The distinction is key… far beyond health, because a deviation is only recognizable when something relatively stable exists against which it can be compared.
Without a baseline, we have no real way of knowing whether something is unusual, whether performance has deteriorated, whether behaviour has changed, or whether a problem is temporary or structural.
Consider a business where client follow-up happens inconsistently.
One week everyone responds quickly. Another week messages sit unanswered. Someone creates a spreadsheet, someone else keeps notes in WhatsApp, and every so often the team has a burst of activity and catches up.
When a client complains that nobody followed up, what exactly has gone wrong?
If there is an established way of working, the organisation can identify the deviation. If there is no established way of working, there is nothing to deviate from. The problem is not that the system failed. There may never have been a system.
The same applies to leadership, finances, communication, decision-making, relationships and even our own behaviour.
We often focus attention on the event that has gone wrong without first asking what normally happens. What is the expected rhythm? What does good look like? What should happen consistently enough that we would notice when it does not?
This is one reason consistency is more strategically useful than it sometimes appears. Consistency produces information because it gives us something to compare. It makes variation visible, and once variation becomes visible, we can begin asking much better questions about what caused it.
A missed workout inside a long-standing exercise routine is very different from exercising occasionally and hoping to become healthier.
One is a deviation from an established baseline. The other is the absence of one.
Organisations make the same mistake when they interpret sporadic good performance as evidence that something is working.
A brilliant month does not necessarily mean the organisation has built a reliable capability. One excellent employee compensating for a broken process does not make the process functional. A leader remembering to follow up most of the time is not a follow-up system.
A few successful outcomes scattered across inconsistent behaviour can easily disguise the fact that no dependable baseline exists.
Before trying to correct a deviation, we need to know whether we are actually looking at one.
Sometimes the intervention is about restoring performance to an established standard. Sometimes the more fundamental work is creating the standard – period.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
What needs to become your consistent baseline so that the occasional deviation can remain just that, a deviation?
I’m Giselle Hudson, The Pre-Fixer™.
For nearly three decades, I’ve worked with business owners and leaders across the Caribbean who carry important decisions largely on their own, often when problems keep returning, solutions fall short, or implementation stalls.
When I ask business owners what problem they can’t seem to solve, the answer is usually “people.” So I ask them to tell me more, because people and businesses are rarely as simple as they first appear.
I help them understand what’s really causing the problem before they spend more trying to fix it. And where needed, I help design the solution and guide their teams to put it into practice.
Get Clarity before the Fix.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
