Why Prioritization Fails
Prioritization is a critical process when resources are limited, but it doesn’t always result in the best outcome. It’s the way an organization prioritizes that often determines its effect.
Certainly psychology and group dynamics come into play; stronger personalities “get their way” more often than others, skewing the way things are prioritized. Ranking the weights of various options may also be swayed by personal judgments. But even with a rigorously objective process, the most common problem is that short term concerns get prioritized over long term ones.
In the book the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey offered a model which illustrates the problem with conventional prioritization. According to this model, every task can be put into one of 4 “quadrants”:
Quadrant 1: Urgent and important
Quadrant 2: Not urgent and important
Quadrant 3: Urgent and not important
Quadrant 4: Not urgent and not important
The problem is most of us spend our day largely dealing with Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 activities because they’re time-sensitive. These are the fires that must be put out; the initiatives to boost earnings for the quarter or the year; pressing emails and phone calls, and so forth. The urgent nature of these tasks cause them to naturally rise to the top.
The paradox is that Quadrant 2 activities, which we never get around to, are actually the items with the highest future value. These are long-term investments in growth and development, building infrastructure, updates to technology and security, and all those activities that essentially “Sharpen the Saw”—or improve our ability to be effective. Although Quadrant 3 is meant to represent “urgent AND not important”, in reality, the way we tend to organize tasks is it to make these important BECAUSE they are urgent. Thus, we all think we are working on Quadrant 1 tasks, all the time. We are, as Covey pointed out, suffering from “urgency addiction”.
The longer a company has been around, the more chronic the problems of focusing purely on “urgent” projects, which include a reliance on antiquated systems, a lack of talent development, and a disengaged workforce.
To correct this imbalance, we must shift our paradigm of prioritization.
If we were to break down the percentage of Quadrant 1, Quadrant 2, and Quadrant 3 tasks in our current planning cycles, almost inevitably we will find way too many Quadrant 1 and 3 tasks and not nearly enough (if any) Quadrant 2 tasks. Even a modest goal of increasing our Quadrant 2 tasks by 20% while reducing our urgent tasks by 20% would have a beneficial long term effect, for our organizations and for our sanity.