Activities and results

Writing a policy is an activity.

So is creating a poster, delivering a training, implementing a control or conducting an audit.

It’s easy for E&C professionals to lose themselves in activities. It can keep us busy all day.

But that’s not enough. All this activity means nothing without results. This is a fact that we sometimes forget. We do things because we’ve always done them or because everyone else is doing them, and we assume that the results will come. We do things all day long without measuring their effectiveness. We talk about all the things we do but not about the results. When we face a bad result we are left to say “But look at all I’ve done!”

Whatever we did wasn’t effective.

Today is an opportunity to look at what we do and ask three questions: “Why am I doing this?”, “What result am I expecting out of this activity?” and “How will I measure this result?” If the answer to any of these question is unclear or unsatisfactory, we need to question whether this activity should be done in the first place.

We must focus on results.