“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” A sign with this Chinese proverb hung on my office wall for a long time. A reminder of the penalty for a lack of focus.

However, I’ve built my consulting practice around the need for eight essential disciplines –

• Build a Healthy Culture

• Hire, Keep, and Develop the Right People

• Thoroughly Understand the Organization’s Value Creation Activity

• Communicate a Meaningful Message in a Compelling Way

• Exercise Extraordinary Financial Discipline

• Measure and Report What Matters

• Develop a Solid Operations and Implementation Framework

And the eighth one

• Practice Deliberate Strategic Intent

So, how do eight essential disciplines co-exist with a single focus. Here’s what I’ve found in almost 20 years of consulting. Organizations are like cars – many parts need to be working in order for the car to run. If the car is running poorly, there’s repair work to do, It might be the engine, the transmission, the brakes, the suspension, or all of them. And that’s where the analogy breaks down. If you’re repairing a car, you can pull it off the street, put it on the rack, and fix everything. The car has no will, no emotion, no resistance, and no preference for what is fixed first. Organizations are not like that. They are filled with humans who have a “horse in the race”, an opinion about what’s going on, and a finite amount of effort that can be expended during the workday. And at least some of that effort must go to the ongoing operation of the business. You can’t put the business “on the rack” and fix everything.

That’s where the eighth discipline comes in, In my work with dozens of organizations in more than a dozen industries, the problems that need to be fixed fall into one or more of the first seven disciplines, But because we humans don’t do a good job of working on more than one or two things at a time, we employ the eighth discipline, Practice Deliberate Strategic Intent.

We pick one or two things on which we will focus. So, if you talk with one of my clients, you might hear every accountant, salesperson, fabricator, technologist, and janitor say, “In the course of my daily work, I’m figuring how I can contribute to lowering the defect rate on the factory floor.” For that three or six months, every employee is focused on that specific transformation. When that problem is solved, we’ll move on to another – possibly in a different one of the first seven disciplines.

Great advice is overrun with the idea of doing one thing. Psychologist Jordan Peterson encourages people who are overwhelmed to “clean your room” because completing “one thing” begins to get you unstuck, Gary Keller in his book, The One Thing, asks the question, “What is the one thing you could do today that would make everything else unnecessary or easier?” Jesus settled a disagreement between two sisters, one who was working furiously and the other who was listening to Him teach, by reminding the first sister that, “only one thing was needful.”

One thing forces you to prioritize, If everything is important, nothing is.

On thing forces you to focus. Hopefully, it makes you pick the highest leverage activity – the one that has the biggest bang for the buck.

I am painfully aware of the tyranny of the urgent. I know the five-alarm fire occasionally happens. But when that fire is put out, you must return to the “one thing.”

If you fail to identify and execute on the “one thing”, you’ll continue to spread your attention across 10 things and, if you’re like most folks, will only apply band-aids instead of permanently fixing problems.