How To Lead A Quest

17 Meaningful Progress

The ultimate purpose of Quest-Augmented Strategy is to enable an enterprise to explore, find, validate, integrate and pursue viable strategic options that ensure its business model and identity remain viable into the future.

Meaningful progress is the antithesis of stagnation and decline.

Through meaningful progress, an enterprise maintains enduring value and relevance. And meaningful progress sees an enterprise outfox the Inevitable Kraken of Doom — by not only identifying new potential growth arcs, but also having the pioneering leadership and adaptive work culture to pursue them.

But this may still seem pretty vague and wordy. How do we really know what constitutes meaningful progress?

FINDING A SENSE OF PROGRESS

We can go about finding a sense of progress in at least two main ways.

We can easily measure progress quantitatively (with numbers).

Using this approach, we declare our objectives, establish milestones and create a visible, clear and measurable sense of progress. We see what we are striving towards, and we reverse-engineer the steps to get there. And the clearer the goal, the easier it is for progress to be measured.

I occasionally use quantified measures to track progress in my health and fitness goals. This includes an app that clearly communicates how frequently, fast and far I've run within any given period of time. Right now — at the ...