What does it mean to deliver?
The words "deliver", "execute", and "ship" tend to be used as if they meant the same thing, and they do not. Before this project goes any further it is worth being explicit about what each one means.
A deliverable is something concrete that another person can pick up: a document, a feature, a working prototype, a signed contract, a published article. The practical test is whether you can hand it over and somebody else can hold it, read it, use it, or reject it. If you cannot do that, what you have is still intent.
Execution is the work of producing the deliverable. It sits in the gap between deciding to do something and having something to show for the decision. A surprising amount of what gets called "failed execution" never really started; what people described as execution was activity that did not actually connect to a deliverable.
Shipping is the last step. It is the point where the deliverable goes out into the world and you can no longer rework it in private. A lot of work gets to "almost shipped" and quietly stays there, which from the outside is hard to tell apart from never having shipped at all.
The distinction between activity and delivery is worth slowing down on. Plenty of teams run a lot of meetings, fill their calendars, hold standups, and produce slide decks while believing they are executing. They are not necessarily wrong, but the connection between visible activity and an eventual deliverable is much weaker than most people assume it is.
Is there any research on this?
Yes, and rather more than I expected when I started looking.
Locke and Latham have been writing about goal-setting for nearly fifty years. Their central finding is that specific and difficult goals produce better outcomes than vague or easy ones. "Do your best" turns out to be a fairly weak instruction. Something like "ship the landing page on Thursday" is closer to how reliable deliverers tend to frame their work.
Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions is, in my view, the single most useful result in the literature. People who form a plan in the format "when X happens, I will do Y" follow through much more often than people who only resolve to do something. The studies cover all sorts of behaviour, from going to the gym to taking medication on time, and the effect is large and reasonably consistent.
Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan wrote Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done in 2002. The book is aimed at executives, but the argument generalises. They treat execution as its own system, with its own processes, rather than as the tail end of strategy. Their conclusion, paraphrased, is that organisations which deliver tend to have a culture of finishing things, which sounds banal until you look at how unusual that culture actually is.
Chris McChesney and his co-authors wrote The 4 Disciplines of Execution a decade later. Their pattern is a small number of important goals, lead measures that you can directly influence, a visible scoreboard, and a regular accountability rhythm. No individual element is new. The unusual thing is finding all four operating in the same place at the same time.
There is more material in this area (Atomic Habits, Getting Things Done, the various agile communities, the Cult of Done manifesto) but the four references above are enough to start from.
What this project will explore
Over time I want to work through four threads:
- The concept of deliverable. What it actually means for a piece of work to be "done", and how to get clear about that early enough for it to matter.
- Finishing. Why the closing stretch of a project is so disproportionately hard, and how people who keep finishing things go about it.
- Working on the wrong thing. A large share of execution effort goes into work that should not have been started, or should have been stopped earlier. How to notice when you are in that situation.
- Avoiding mistakes. Which kinds of errors keep recurring in real delivery work, and what people who manage to avoid them seem to do differently.
If you want something to take away today, take Gollwitzer's finding: pick one thing you have been intending to deliver, and decide specifically when and where you will work on it next.