Cadence of Accountability

What it is

The fourth discipline, listed by FranklinCovey in its launch release as creating a cadence of accountability, comes from The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling (Free Press, 2012).

The idea is that a goal, a measure and a scoreboard do nothing unless something makes people look at them on a schedule. The meeting is regular and short. Each person says what they committed to last time, reports the number against it, and names what they will do before the next meeting. The scoreboard from the third discipline is where the reporting happens.

Cal Newport describes an individual version in Deep Work (2016). His is a weekly review: count the hours of deep work, work out what produced the good weeks, and plan the coming one. It runs alongside a wildly important goal and a lead measure tally, and it is the habit that keeps the other two in view.

The page for Wildly Important Goal covers the first discipline, and the page for Lead Measure and Lag Measure covers the second.

In effect

The nearest independent research is the 2016 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin on monitoring goal progress. It reviewed randomised experiments, 138 studies with nearly 20,000 participants. The interventions raised how often people monitored their progress and produced a smaller but reliable gain in goal attainment. The gain was larger when outcomes were reported or made public. A meeting at which each person reports a number to colleagues is a reporting arrangement of this kind, and that connection is our reading, since the experiments tested monitoring interventions and not the framework.

Locke and Latham's 2002 review adds a related finding from goal-setting research: goals combined with feedback on progress outperformed goals alone. A regular meeting is one way to deliver that feedback on a schedule.

The other side of public commitment is covered on the page for Progress Monitoring and in the article Why Announcing Your Goal Can Backfire. Reporting progress and announcing an intention are different acts, and the evidence on them differs.

A 2022 conference paper on 43 relationship managers at one Indonesian bank reported that each of the four disciplines, the cadence included, was positively associated with meeting credit targets. The data came from questionnaires, interviews and company records at one bank.

What it does not say

It does not say that more meetings produce more results. The monitoring research concerns reporting and recording progress, and it does not examine how often a team should meet or how long the meeting should run.

It does not say that the framework's version of the meeting has been tested. The experiments in the meta-analysis tested monitoring interventions in many settings, and none of them is described as a test of this discipline.

It does not settle the question of side effects. A 2009 paper in Academy of Management Perspectives, titled Goals Gone Wild, argued that goal setting has systematic side effects, including more unethical behaviour, and a meeting at which people report numbers against targets is a setting where reporting pressure can arise. The paper is about goal setting in general.

The company that sells the framework offered a count of client teams as its evidence, with no outcome data in its launch release. Direct evaluation by others is limited to a small conference paper from one bank, which shows an association and cannot show cause.

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