I’ve come to believe that teams can prioritize much more effectively by focusing less on the specific things they’re prioritizing (which will naturally be important, and will naturally get attention) and more on the tensions they’re observing and acting out day after day.
I have been thinking about this a lot and I think it stems largely from orgs not baking the time for this kind of reflection. You also need someone internal who can facilitate and uncover those connections and that's even more unusual.
I think this becomes the system not because the planners and executors don't want to do better, but because it's what their leadership explicitly and implicitly signals what they want.
Leadership installs Agile/Scrum/Kanban and other methodologies because that's what's trendy, not by evaluating what's best for their org. This leaves their teams doing performative planning, ceremonies and reporting. If you're swimming against this (border collies), you've already hit your glass ceiling, unhappy and being slowly managed out.
The real work on the 'tensions' get's done in the margins of what you've told leadership you're working on - the last 10-20% of capacity. Some of this work will be celebrated, and others unrecognized.
On top of this, leadership fails to support the ruthless prioritization and decisions needed to drop low-ROI items. They tell their team to own their decisions, but turn around, second guess them based on intuition or escalations and ask for them to be kept alive - the margins just grew to 30-40%. Now we're being asked why we're not going to hit our big goals faster, but we're hamstrung.
Every engagement I run gets a state of the engagement synthesis at the twenty percent mark, early enough that nobody has a result to defend yet. The tensions still resurfacing at that point are the only ones worth putting on a list.
Also: strongly agree with your take that even though we try, we’re not really doing any kind of rational prioritisation.
Largely, we act based on short term expected emotional outcome. Discipline *looks* like it’s people overriding that, like the person who goes jogging every day, or publishes articles every week ;) but it’s secretly that such a person gets a short term positive expected emotional outcome from jogging or publishing. Sometimes they get it for “free”, sometimes they’ve trained themselves over months or years.
I think of that with teams too, and the frequent failed attempts to enforce “change everything” vs the relative success of shifting what kinds of things tend to feel good/easy to do vs bad/hard inside that system.
“Problems grow to the size needed for you to acknowledge them.”
"The simple act of taking a pen and writing down the list of problems that are affecting you and the ways they are negatively impacting your life will often be all you need."
(Luca Dellanna, 100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late)
I have been thinking about this a lot and I think it stems largely from orgs not baking the time for this kind of reflection. You also need someone internal who can facilitate and uncover those connections and that's even more unusual.
I think this becomes the system not because the planners and executors don't want to do better, but because it's what their leadership explicitly and implicitly signals what they want.
Leadership installs Agile/Scrum/Kanban and other methodologies because that's what's trendy, not by evaluating what's best for their org. This leaves their teams doing performative planning, ceremonies and reporting. If you're swimming against this (border collies), you've already hit your glass ceiling, unhappy and being slowly managed out.
The real work on the 'tensions' get's done in the margins of what you've told leadership you're working on - the last 10-20% of capacity. Some of this work will be celebrated, and others unrecognized.
On top of this, leadership fails to support the ruthless prioritization and decisions needed to drop low-ROI items. They tell their team to own their decisions, but turn around, second guess them based on intuition or escalations and ask for them to be kept alive - the margins just grew to 30-40%. Now we're being asked why we're not going to hit our big goals faster, but we're hamstrung.
Every engagement I run gets a state of the engagement synthesis at the twenty percent mark, early enough that nobody has a result to defend yet. The tensions still resurfacing at that point are the only ones worth putting on a list.
Also: strongly agree with your take that even though we try, we’re not really doing any kind of rational prioritisation.
Largely, we act based on short term expected emotional outcome. Discipline *looks* like it’s people overriding that, like the person who goes jogging every day, or publishes articles every week ;) but it’s secretly that such a person gets a short term positive expected emotional outcome from jogging or publishing. Sometimes they get it for “free”, sometimes they’ve trained themselves over months or years.
I think of that with teams too, and the frequent failed attempts to enforce “change everything” vs the relative success of shifting what kinds of things tend to feel good/easy to do vs bad/hard inside that system.
“Problems grow to the size needed for you to acknowledge them.”
"The simple act of taking a pen and writing down the list of problems that are affecting you and the ways they are negatively impacting your life will often be all you need."
(Luca Dellanna, 100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late)