12/5/2019 The 5 Diseases of Prioritization

THE LEAN POST

The 5 Diseases of Prioritization

by Jim Benson
January 11, 2018

During the recession in the early 1980s, my father was building a set of townhomes along a golf
course in Grand Island, NE. He went over the units to do his daily site visit and was surprised to
find a plumber sound asleep in the living room. Why would he be asleep in the middle of the
day? He gets paid by the job – not the hour.

So, my dad nudged him with his foot and said that the general contractor wouldn’t be pleased to
find him asleep. “Awww, that guy hasn’t paid me in months,” the plumber said. “If he hasn’t paid
you in months, why are you doing this at all?” My dad asked. “I need the work,” the plumber
replied.

Psychologists have found that business prioritization is the most cognitively taxing thing we do.
This is no surprise. At the office, we create a mess of conflicting narratives about what we are
doing, who we are doing it for, and why. We overpromise our efforts and the efforts of those we
work with. We take on more work than we can handle and agree to unreasonable deadlines and
budgets because “we need the work.”

When my business partner Tonianne and I work with clients, we are always asked about
prioritization. I’ve blogged about it. Written books about it. Made videos about it. But the sad fact
is, prioritization doesn’t exist on its own. People with clarity of purpose and a drive to act never
need to prioritize.

So it may seem like the plumber was prioritizing sleeping over working, but he was actually
prioritizing having crappy work over having no work at all. If it weren’t in the middle of the
recession he would have told Terry (the general contractor) to pound sand and gotten work
elsewhere.

Most of us currently have the other problem: we are overloaded. When we are overloaded we
feel we need to prioritize our work. We don’t know what to do because our options are so many
and our time, so limited.

The secret here is that prioritization is rarely a problem on its own; rather, it is a symptom of a
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larger illness or set of illnesses. And since this blog post promised five of them, here they are:

1. Swervy – Swervy is caused by deficiency of Vitamin G – you have no clear goals. Goals
are more than just “be the industry leader in world-class, time-saving micro-widgets.”
Goals, when done right, actually steer your company. Goals provide the people in your
organization with a framework to make internally consistent decisions. If your goal is to
work more in Wisconsin, your team will look for work there and not Bavaria. If you don’t
have a goal, decisions are made piecemeal, which means stretched resources, unclear
directions, and overload. Prioritization happens here because projects of random makeup
enter the patient’s workstream causing systemic confusion over why we are doing the
work in the first place.
2. Thickets – Thickets is utterly forgetting Vitamin C – you don’t know your capacity. When
teams and organizations don’t track their work and measure what they can actually
complete, they will always prioritize projected income over quality or safety. We can use
throughput, cycle time, and lead-time as good lagging indicators of capacity, but Toni and
I like to use things like attrition, sick days, and just plain angry people. Humans are very
good at breaking down under stress. Prioritization happens here because the organism
has too many projects to process and blockages frequently occur.
3. Costeoporosis –Lacking in Vitamin F (feedback), sufferers of Costeoporosis are working
diligently to keep up with overload and confusion. They are so diligent, in fact, that they
neglect to talk to each other about what they’ve learned or observed. As a result, the
organization spends time, energy, money, and goodwill solving the same problems.
Mistakes repeat themselves throughout the organization. Prioritization is required here
because the overhead of repeated problem solving creates schedule delays, cost
overruns, and depletions of patience.
4. Planemia – Clearly overdosing on Vitamin P – planning (which has a much lower
recommended dietary intake than any of us realize) – creates focus on the perfection of
plans. Setting budgets, timelines, and resourcing with strong “accountability” drives
projects to value looking healthy over being healthy. In the planemic patient, projects are
not allowed to learn and adjust as they progress – they merely age and calcify, often
resulting in the dismissal of the project manager or other scapegoat. Prioritization here is
a desperate act by the project manager to keep the original project plan alive when
events have clearly superseded the original plan.
5. Politicitis – Regardless of diet, the patient is infested with parasites that actively suck
Vitamins, G, C, and F and replace them with overdoses of P. In this case, the patient
meets before the beginning of the calendar year for months of painful, angry, and
ultimately destructive meetings to prioritize all the projects for the upcoming 12 months.
Each silo in the organization seeks to hoard resources and power, creating projects with
unclear goals, unrealistic big batches, structural impediments to feedback, and massive
and ungainly plans. Prioritization now becomes a major corporate “need” as the
organization strives not to collapse from multiple, programmatic illnesses.

Do any of these sound familiar? Any deficiencies you can spot right now in your organization? I
will be speaking about building a business operating system that sets clear goals, understands
capacity, builds coherent feedback loops, replaces plans with organized learning, and removes
self-destructive politics at the upcoming 2018 Lean Transformation Summit, March 26-27.

I hope to see you there.

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The views expressed in this post do not necessarily represent the views or policies of The Lean
Enterprise Institute.

Keywords: leadership, management, Mura, Muri, Muda, overburden (Muri), personal

kanban

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