Set 4: Prioritization and Decision Making

There are three very distinct types of priorities that need to be addressed in any organization and all of them need to be approached with rigor and vigor. The most common problem I see facing organizations, both big and small, is not a lack of vision or strategy but rather an inability to define the critical few priorities that are needed to achieve those goals across these three priority types. This most typically manifests as: too many priorities, unclear priorities, priorities that have not been operationalized at all levels of the organization (e.g. sub-teams aren’t actually working on the right things), or an over-indexing on one or two of the priority types (the most common fault being too much energy spent on operational priorities and not enough spent on strategic priorities that move the needle or organizational priorities that build the capabilities required to actually move the needle). All three are crucial.

Line-of-sight describes a world where all of the resources in your organization (where possible) are working to support the highest-order priorities that have been set. Creating line-of-sight requires a couple of things. Of course the key first step is to craft the right Level 0 (or highest order) priorities. Once you do that you can begin to cascade and re-cascade those priorities throughout the organization into the appropriate working groups. The above visual schematic shows what that looks like. In this example the very first Level 0 organizational priority (in the blue list) is being worked on by Group 1, Group 2, and Group 1.1 (a sub-team of Group 1). As you can see from this model every group or team in an organization should have their own localized list of priorities that include strategic, organizational, and operational components.

Explicitly maintaining your priority lists with cut-lines will save your organization untold hours of repeated conversations and wasted ‘spin’ cycles dealing with potential work that shouldn’t even be discussed. One of my biggest pet peeves is the random lob into a conversation of ‘What about X? We could do X!’ (and of course, any organization can take almost any path, but at what opportunity cost?). This allows conversation around priorities to stay focused and concise and provides the benefit of transparency to the entire organization.

If you have read through all of the decks thus far in order (which I recommend) then you have a lot of potential frameworks spinning in your head. It might seem overwhelming but in reality it all comes together into a fairly simple connected workflow. The role of any leader is to define the direction, build the organizational capabilities to get there, set the right priorities (across the three key types), and put in place the necessary operating mechanisms to make it all work. Throughout the entire process you are driving line-of-sight, energy, and applying the art of sequencing.

Once your priorities are defined you are ready to move into actually doing the work. In a perfect world the best path to achieve a given priority would be obvious and teams could simply move forward and make magic happen. In reality, however, multiple paths can be taken that offer wildly divergent costs, benefits, feasibility, and down-stream implications. The TIDE framework provides a structured way for a leader to interject himself into this process while avoiding the curse of micro-management and the subsequent morale reduction that comes with it. It’s a simple four-step process that you apply to any priority. Step 1: you align on the success metrics, the timing, the DACI or RACI (common frameworks that define who is doing what). Step 2: you ideate on alternative paths to achieve those goals. You go wide and creative and then narrow down to the best candidates. Step 3: you decide on the optimal path and put in place the resources and execution plans to move forward. A key point here is that all parts of an organization must now align and move forward even if there is no consensus (those that cannot align become energy dilutive and should be dealt with accordingly). Finally, you execute the plan. The yellow boxes represent points where you can opt to interject yourself as a leader and either add value or get critical updates on progress.

If I could choose one word to describe the typical business environment it would be: messy. Maybe the single hardest trait for a leader to acquire is what I call the sequencing gene. How do you determine which of the other seven levers to pull when you are in the middle of a maelstrom? Do you spend time and energy building capabilities or do you push forward now with the capabilities you have? Is your foundational strategy off-the-mark, do you just have a problem with priorities or simply with execution against those priorities? Given the complexity and unique challenges of any organization sequencing cannot be readily taught—but the skill can be built and honed through experience and shadowing.