What Are The Six Disciplines?

By Skip Reardon

Strategic Partner Management Services

The Six Disciplines Methodology is a synchronized, systematic approach for building your business. It puts together into a single integrated step-by-step process - the "master process" that most companies do haphazardly at best - or at worst, not at all.

The six fundamental disciplines involve strategy, planning, organizing, executing, innovating, and organizational learning. 

You can think of the Six Disciplines Methodology as a series of annual, quarterly, weekly and daily repeatable cycles which, with each successive pass, helps you and your team learn how to communicate, collaborate, and perform better.

The foundation of all strategy formulation is deciding what is most important to your organization(and by implication, what’s not important) so the allocation of resources—time, money and creativity—can all be aimed toward this end. In this discipline, we help you to systematically review and renew your mission, values, market segments, competitive position, strategic position, vision, and agreeing what to stop doing.

Discipline II - Set Goals That Lead

Well-defined goals are among the most effective communications tools available to any leader—yet most leaders don’t know how to set goals that lead their people in the right direction. The purpose of this discipline is to produce goals that are clear and measurable. In this discipline, we help you to review near-term growth options, finalize strategic difference and operating goals, set targets, initiatives, and outcomes. 

Discipline III - Align Systems

One of the greatest barriers an organization faces in pursuing its goals is itself. For many businesses, the systems that make up the business—its policies, processes, technologies, measures, and people—are often at cross purposes with the priorities of the company. Why? Because most organizations don't have an organized or disciplined approach to keep their systems aligned with their strategy.  In this discipline, we help you to complete departments SWOT, updated departmental and initiative goals, balance workloads, finalize plans, and review measure integration. 

Discipline IV - Work The Plan

Whereas Disciplines I, II, and III are part of the strategy and planning process, Discipline IV is lived out (executed) by every person, every day. This is where all the other disciplines come together and the work gets done. In this discipline, every individual worker connects what he or she is doing on a daily basis with the long-term goals of the company. In this discipline, we help you to review your self-leadership model, how to realign yourself and your teams weekly, how to triage activity in real-time, how to learn from experience each quarter, and modify goals along the way.

Discipline V - Innovate Purposefully

Discipline V is unlike the other five disciplines, because it provides principles and tools that are used in the day-to-day execution of the steps in all the other disciplines. In other words, “innovating purposefully” is not an isolated event in an annual or quarterly cycle; it’s a mindset that permeates the culture of an excellent organization. In this discipline, we help you to brainstorm, use 100 point exercises, conduct quick ROI analyses, 5-step problem solving, champion your ideas, and recognize contributions. 

Discipline VI - Step Back

This annual discipline helps your entire organization to step back from everyday business and gain perspective on the factors that affect business performance.  In this discipline, we help you to design how Six Disciplines will be implemented in your organization, how to manage the strategy execution process, how to benchmark how time is being used, survey stakeholder satisfaction, review external trends and internal results, complete a corporate SWOT, and update the self-leadership plan (performance reviews/appraisals, 360 feedback surveys, and leadership development plans. 

For more information, please send an email to 6D@emailta.com.