Executing

Owning Your Autonomy

You have a clear responsibility. You understand the outcome. You know your authorities and constraints. You've designed a strategy. Now you execute.

This is where ownership becomes real in a different way. It's not about planning anymore. It's about making decisions confidently and living with the results.

Your T actical Autonomy

Within the boundaries of your authorities and constraints, every tactical choice is yours to make. How you approach the work. Which tools you use. How you sequence the effort. How you adapt when something doesn't work as expected.

You don't need permission for these choices. You don't need to explain your reasoning to your leader. That's what autonomy means.

The only boundary is your authorities and constraints. Stay within those, and you're operating properly. The specific path you take, even during execution, is yours.

This matters because it's where you actually develop and demonstrate your judgment. If you defer to others to make these decisions, you never learn to trust your own thinking. Once your responsibility is defined, your lead expects you to exercise autonomy. They expect you  to think carefully about what works, make mistakes, and learn from them. You get better.

Don’t give a moment to thinking that you shouldn’t exercise your authority on this or that decision. Once you accepted the responsibility, everyone expects you to own it. 

The Simplicity of Execution - Taking One Step at a Time

Most people see execution as needing to have the answers from the start. They look at the responsibility, the constraints, the outcome, and they think: "I need to figure out the perfect path forward before I move."

That creates complexity. And it creates paralysis.

Here's where you glimpse the next level: When you envision execution as taking one reasonable step with a commitment to finding the next step, complexity becomes simplicity.

You don't need the perfect strategy. You need a reasonable first move. Try it. Learn from it. Figure out what's next. Take that step. Repeat.

Each cycle is simple. The outcome is clear. The learning is real. The confidence builds because you're actually doing the work, not theorizing about it.

This is how you move forward when you're not sure you have it all figured out. You don't need to. You just need to take the next step and be committed to finding the one after that.

When Renegotiation Is Necessary

Two things trigger renegotiation:

First: You can't see a reasonable next step that remains true to your responsibility. 

You've been executing. You've worked through multiple cycles of trying and learning. And through that learning, you've gained insight into how all the pieces actually fit together. You can now see that the responsibility as structured—the outcome you're pursuing within these authorities and constraints, given what you now understand about the real situation—cannot succeed. There is no reasonable next step.

This isn't failure. It's honest assessment. When you see this, you go back: "I've been working through this. I simply don't see a path forward that will deliver the results we need. Let’s talk about how you want me to proceed.”

Second: The Key Results are naive.

You're executing and you realize the metrics you agreed on don't actually reflect what's happening. They don't tell the true story of progress or failure. When this happens, you're not just correcting a number—you're correcting the governance structure so your leader can actually see what's real.

In both cases, renegotiation is you protecting your leader's outcome by being honest about what needs to change.

Never Stop Monitoring What's Actually Happening

As you execute, you're watching two things: your key results and your strategic assumptions.

Key results tell you whether you're on track. If the metrics you agreed on are solid and fair, they should give you and your leader an accurate picture of progress. If you're hitting the targets, then you're delivering. If you're missing them, something needs to change.

Sometimes, though, as you execute, you realize the KRs aren't telling the true story. Maybe they're measuring the wrong thing. Maybe they miss something important. Maybe, by pursuing these particular key results, you’re creating unintended consequences—you could hit the numbers but violate the intention of what you're trying to achieve.

When that happens, you don't just keep grinding toward inappropriate metrics. You go back to your leader: "I want to make sure we're governing this accurately. Here's what I'm seeing—these KRs don't quite tell the real story. Can we adjust them?" That's correcting the oversight structure so they can actually see what's happening.

Strategic assumptions are the bets you made in your strategy. You assumed that if you did X, then Y would happen. Perhaps you assumed the market would respond a certain way. Or maybe you assumed your team had a certain capability. As you execute, you test those assumptions.

When an assumption is longer valid, you have two choices: adjust your tactics (still within your autonomy) or renegotiate the responsibility if the broken assumption means you can't deliver the outcome within your authority and constraints. This is a common failure point - leaders who are unwilling to recognize the simple reality that things change over time. Assumptions that were perfectly valid back when the strategy was first formed are no longer reliable.

Lacking Confidence - When You're Not Sure You Have It

Sometimes you take on a responsibility and partway through, you realize you're not confident you can deliver it. You're working at the edge of your skills and experience. Everything seems a little shaky. 

Congratulations. You’re normal.

Here's where your activation process becomes essential.

A perfect plan that considers every possible future variable? That’s impossible. You only need to have an activation process. Here’s the most simple. It’s been proven time after time. 

1. Take a worthwhile step. 
2. Watch what happens. 
3. Learn from it. 
4. If it seems to work, figure out the next step. If not, do something different.  
5. Repeat.

Each time you repeat this activation process, you build your confidence because you're learning. As you learn, you rely less and less on intuition or guessing.  

That's the activation sequence in real time: assess → try → monitor → adjust → try again.

If you're genuinely stuck—if you've tried and learned but you don’t see any path forward—then go back to your leader: "I've been working through this, and here's what I'm learning. I think I need some guidance. Can we talk about that?"

But most of the time, your confidence comes from actually doing the work, learning from it, and adjusting. That's what separates people who plateau from people who keep growing. And that’s how you build wisdom.

So don’t worry about being skilled enough to see your way through to the end. It's about falling back on  a process that works even when you're momentarily stuck.

Autonomy Is The Starting Point for Adding Value

When you understand that your tactical choices are genuinely yours—that you don't need permission or explanation for decisions within your authorities—you see your role in a new light. And when you have a viable SPCS process that doesn’t require you to have all of the answers, you stop second-guessing yourself. You stop waiting for approval. You take that first step. You move forward.

As you move forward, eventually delivering on commitments within the boundaries you've accepted, you stop being someone who executes assignments. You become someone who owns outcomes.

That’s what others need you to do. That’s where you add value to their lives.

And it’s how you move from "able" to "trusted."