Every company wants to return consistent results quarter over quarter, year over year, decade over decade. They want to consistently beat expectations. They want to consistently beat their competitors. They want to consistently satisfy and retain their customers.
Unfortunately, we live in a very inconsistent, yet highly interconnected, world. Achieving next year’s expectations is sometimes impossible before the year even begins because of forces beyond our control. Sometimes our expectations and those of others misalign in unachievable ways. Sometimes the vagaries of fate play a role in simply introducing chaos and uncertainty.
One of my favorite models of consistency is the written Fed report that they publish after their meetings. They have achieved a level of consistency with this document, that organizations evaluate the previous version to the new version word-by-word to understand policy change. I would argue that very, very few people or organizations need to achieve this level of consistency but it’s important to know what others do.
Consistency is foundationally a matter of communication. You can achieve consistent results all you want, but if others don’t know it or understand it the way you do, your consistency is for nothing. Take quarterly earnings reports as another example. Many companies have teams that spend a full month every quarter preparing the talking points for their leadership to present on the call. Which words to use, how to spin the results, how it aligns with previous expectations, what topics to deflect and which to dive into. All of this in the name of ensuring that people understand performance over the past quarter and that expectations for the next quarter are aligned with what they are looking for. It’s about the framing and the communication more than the results themselves.
Becoming known for consistency requires a lot of work outside of just getting the results you need. 50+% of the development of any good presentation is spent on detailed wordsmithing, ensuring everything looks good, verifying the story flow, questioning how various receivers will interpret it. The actual content is usually the easy part. But that’s what it takes to become consistent.