Prioritization: don’t overthink it
Prioritization is important to almost every business decision. But in my experience we have a tendency to overthink it. Making the process much simpler might make it better.
This article belongs to a series of articles where I hope to explain how I’ve collaborated with exceptional talent, teams and organizations to turn theory into action.
One of the challenges with prioritization is that we tend to decide what’s important before we see the data.
I assume its because general business-wisdom has told us that when prioritizing: create a one- or two-directional graph where the x-value and the y-value always represents values like: time, risk, feasibility, impact, etc.
But I’ve found that this is not very helpful. Because it immediately biases the data to confirm the value we’ve chosen before we even started looking at the data.
E.g. say that the team has collected a lot of insights and are being asked to make sense of it. Choosing how to prioritize the data before they even look at it is like being asked to paint a picture of a landscape, but then only bringing yellow paint.
“Data precedes framework” — Dave Snowden
The better way to prioritize is to not predetermine whats important before you look at the data. But to let the data lead the way.
How do you do it?
The way we’ve done it is to present the team with the data and then ask them to prioritize it based on a simple question:
“what is more or less important? Put the more important data further to the right and less important to the left”.
This works remarkably well!
I’ve never encountered any team that is not able to do this. In fact it speeds up prioritization and works especially well with cross-functional teams.
Then the data tells you what’s important
As data gets put onto the prioritization board in an orderly manner you start looking for patterns. You ask the team:
“Why is this data point more important than that data point, and why is this less important than that?”
Now the logic of the prioritization emerges and the team learns what itself sees as more or less important. Now you can ask the team to add the x- and the y-axis.
That’s it!
I’ve had a few people react to this process before we try it as its perceived to be too “open ended”, but having tested it so many times I’ve rather found it to be:
- Much more efficient
- Less biasing to the data
- Even helps the team learn and articulate what is more or less important to them.
Let me know if you try it and how that goes.
