My experience with 4DX

‘The 4DX, Achieving Wildly Important Goals’, written by McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling is a unique book. The strategy proposed in the book is grounded on several key management principles like fair process, focused activity and principles of routine development which make the strategy extremely powerful and effective.

I read the book in 2019 and under a strong impression decided to apply for the training program to become a certified associate & consultant of 4DX. Soon I received an email from the Franklin Covey Global which offers the training on 4DX. It was saying that ‘the process of becoming encompassed a legal agreement and license fee being exchanged. The License fee for Mongolia would be US$50,000 and payable at the time of signing’. That was similar to the effect of a cold shower sobering me from my delusions. US$50,000 was simply unaffordable in my situation. Nevertheless, I have not given up and decided to develop the 4DX methodology on my own based purely on what I grasped from the book and how I made sense of them.

In the spring of 2020, I came across a company interested in the experimentation of the 4DX strategy at their company. It was a mining company producing white marbles and the management was interested in increasing quality of production which was ultimately dependent on sizes of marble blocks cut out of rocks. We started with the identification of WIGs and associate lead measures. The main source of problems with product quality was inadequate drilling which consequently was resulting in poor cutting. Hence precise positioning and levelling of drilling equipment were critical. We were about to start meticulously checking whether the operators position their drilling equipment in compliance with the instructions. But unfortunately, the management was suddenly fired ostensibly because of some internal conflicts, but in a reality, it turned out to be because of conflict with the Company’s owner. So our plans were screwed up.

I had to find a new company which is not easy due to the lack of understanding of the true value of the 4DX technique. Nevertheless, in the fall of 2020, I come across another company the owner of which expressed his interests in implementing the 4DX strategies at his company. This time I was luckier. We are going to start installing the 4DX from 1 January 2021. All preparations have been completed right before the New Year.

Why am I sharing this? For two simple reasons. First, there are no doubts that the book offers a valuable technique of execution improvement. But critical details are omitted. Probably it won’t make sense for authors to include every detail in the book. But the efforts of defining the WIGs and associated lead measures clearly showed that there are several small fuzzy aspects that need to be addressed if someone wants to install the 4DX. I believe this type of information would be interesting and helpful for people who can’t afford the 4DX services. Secondly, the 4DX technique doesn’t work alone. It requires some prerequisites about which the book is silent. I presume such descriptions should be interesting and valuable again. So, next time I will share my experience of how we identified the WIGs.

I hope I am not violating any copyrights by doing so since the book is a publicly available resource.