At this point, I feel like God gave my wife her job so I'd have an endless supply of coaching experiences from which to draw. I got a recent gem of a story that helps illustrate the idea of Focus on Finishing. Without further ado, your Tuesday Tidbit.
Suppi (he goes by his last name) works for my wife and was tasked with building a theater stage. One excellent quality of Suppi is his intense attention to detail. He can be slow, but he creates works of art. As you can imagine, the work to build a stage requires quite a bit of time and focus. However, you are probably well aware of the constant, well intentioned, requests that can inadvertently shift your focus. In our story, that shift came in the form of someone asking Suppi about remodeling the floor in front of the theater stage.
Suppi immediately started doing what any of us may do; research on remodeling a theater floor. But do you know what work wasn't getting done? That's right. The theater stage. Having already been committed to, the theater stage was only a few boards away from being finished. My wife had a brilliant idea (I'm biased, I'm sure) for how to keep Suppi focused. Each time he would say something about the floor project she would say "Suppi, the theater floor doesn't exist. Ignore it." And it worked. Focus on the stage allowed them to finish the work on time and honor their commitment.
I see this same thing happen all the time to well intentioned teams. The leaders may say "let's just get ahead on the next thing" and the team gets excited about some new problem they could potentially solve. But here's the thing, we have to be willing, both makers and stakeholders, to say "No, the floor objective doesn't exist. Only the stage exists." Believe me when I say it's not an easy thing to do. There is a risk we take in focusing on one objective at a time, but there is also the risk of not completing anything when we start everything. If you're doing multiple projects or objectives right now, just huddle up as a team and ask "what big objective are we putting at risk by trying to do other objectives." Once you do that, and you find the one most important thing, stay on track by continuously saying "if it doesn't help the big objective, it doesn't exist..."
[Update 12-27-2021] The company decided to hire an outside contractor to refinish the floor in the theater. Not only did Suppi not take part in that project, none of the work he did to research was used by the contractor.