Ep. 27: Everything Can’t Be Priority One
About this episode:
Original Air Date: June 2, 2025We talk a lot about doing less to get more—but in practice, most organizations end up doing the opposite. When priorities pile up, and nothing gets removed or finished, the result is a familiar kind of chaos: too many projects, too little focus, and an endless loop of adding more in hopes of getting unstuck.
This week, Rodney and Sam unpack one of the most common organizational dynamics they see: the “more-is-more” trap of priority overload. They dig into why deprioritizing anything at work feels so psychologically and politically fraught, how identity and sunk costs keep teams clinging to low-impact efforts, and ways for leadership teams to prioritize at a org wide level, not just assemble a laundry list of everyone’s pet projects.
Mentioned in this episode:
“Depthfinding”: The Ready’s Depthfinding framework
John Cutler’s prioritization article
WSJF (“weighted-shortest-job-first”)
“GTD”: BNW Ep. 39 with David Allen
Even/Overs: BNW Ep. 44
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Sam Spurlin:
Your calendar is a way of visualizing your work. And if you've ever done an audit of your last month of your calendar or given somebody else your calendar and asked them, "All right, what do you think my priorities are?" Usually they tell you a thing that you probably are not telling yourself.
Rodney Evans:
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. I'm Rodney Evans, and that guy is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
Hello, Rodney Evans.
Rodney Evans:
Hello Sam. Welcome back to At With Work... What's this podcast called? Welcome. Okay. Welcome back to At Work With The Ready. This is a podcast about modernizing organizations as the future of work collides with the present moment.
Sam Spurlin:
Each episode we turn our attention to one common organizational pattern that we think is worth digging into, and then we pull it apart like my wife pulling the crust off a piece of pizza and calling it a breadstick. And we propose solutions for what to do instead.
Rodney Evans:
I love this for Emily. That's amazing. This week we're talking about prioritization because, y'all, you need it. We all need it. We need it so bad right now. But before we do that, we got to prioritize a check-in, eh, Sam?
Sam Spurlin:
We sure do. And Rodney, I want to know, what's a molehill you're currently willing to defend until the end? And I'm happy to go first because this is one maybe requires a little bit of thinking. Here's my molehill. The expiration date on a yogurt, you can go a couple days beyond it. They are so conservative about putting expiration dates on things that as long as you're within a day or two and it smells okay, you're good to go. Don't throw it away, just eat it
Rodney Evans:
First, can I just ask a question about whether there are two colloquialisms inside of this check-in round? Is this the hill you can die on and making a mountain out of a molehill in one question?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Yeah. Is this not a normal phrase? Did I just accidentally make it up?
Rodney Evans:
No. Yeah. Nobody says, "What's a molehill you'll defend until the end?" Yeah, what's the hill you'll die on?
Sam Spurlin:
Get on my level hill, Rodney. Get on my level.
Rodney Evans:
I don't think I can. I'm not really sure. I got one.
Sam Spurlin:
All right, lay it on me.
Rodney Evans:
Okay. I don't think it's a molehill because I feel like molehills are small and this is kind of big.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay.
Rodney Evans:
We don't need billionaires.
Sam Spurlin:
All the billionaire listeners on this podcast just turned it off, Rodney. How do you feel about that?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I feel fine about it. If they could just stay tuned to hear me say, "Give your money to someone who needs it or an organization that needs it before you tune out," that would be great. I've been seeing this statistic that says the bottom 60% of Americans can't have a reasonable quality of life even if they're fully employed, which is a fancy way of saying the majority of employed Americans cannot have a reasonable standard of life. And I'm just like, no one needs a billion dollars.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
People should be rich. I think that's great. Have $50 million. Have $100 million. That's cool. No one needs more-
Sam Spurlin:
I mean, even 500 million is less than a billion. That's a lot of money.
Rodney Evans:
That's so much money. Nobody needs more money than that. And I don't see a use case where that's not true.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I'm just going to keep banging on about no more billionaires. It's stupid and they're making the world worse in every way.
Sam Spurlin:
Agreed.
Rodney Evans:
Great.
Sam Spurlin:
And I'm really appreciating just the dichotomy of expired yogurt and no more billionaires. I feel like that really encapsulates this podcast in some way that I can't really put my finger on.
Rodney Evans:
It's the macro and the micro, you know?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, exactly.
Rodney Evans:
There's a parallel to be drawn that we're both too tired to make right now.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. I'm so checked in. Rodney, what the heck are we doing today? What's the pattern we're doing?
Rodney Evans:
So checked in. The highly effortful one.
Sam Spurlin:
It's been a minute since we've done a pattern episode because we did Depthfinding for a while and then you talked to NBS and I wasn't there and I was very sad about it. And now back to our original sort of structure.
Rodney Evans:
Back to our roots. Although I will say as a public service announcement, I'm not going to not use Depthfinding words-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, of course.
Rodney Evans:
... because now I can't not use them when I go to make this episode. So we're going to talk about these patterns, but it's still going to come up. So just everybody strap in.
The Pattern: We prioritize everything and nothing gets done
Rodney Evans:
But in our last Depthfinding episode, I talked about how I wanted to tackle prioritization because I feel like all of us are overwhelmed by the world right now in some way, and it is quite difficult when the zone is so flooded and there's so much uncertainty to determine what to prioritize. The pattern that I see a lot, and I'm curious if this sort of squares with what you're seeing is this, when the world is changing as fast as it is, it's quite difficult to focus. We are responding again and again and again as there's new stimulus from the environment and we are often confusing recency and urgency. And as a result of that, priorities keep getting added, resources are spread too thin. And as a result of that, the ROI on priorities isn't there, which leads to adding priorities. It's just this vicious cycle of doing more and getting less and doing more and getting less. And that's really what I want to dig into today because I think the impulse is very natural and also I don't think it's serving very well right now.
Sam Spurlin:
Completely agree. Let's dig in. I think this is a very prevalent pattern now, and I think, I was going to say before, I don't know what the before is that I'm actually thinking of because things have always been complex and chaotic out in the world, but somehow feels particularly so right now. So yeah, let's fix priorities for people. Let's do it.
Rodney Evans:
Let's fix it. So when we started talking about this episode, you had some very interesting references and I think we should start there. So my first question to you is what is the job of prioritization? Or what are the jobs of prioritization? Let's just baseline with the definition.
John Cutler’s 4 Jobs of Prioritization
Sam Spurlin:
Sure. I mean I think a lot of words that we sometimes use in this work, and I'm thinking of complex, complicated, we all think we have the definition of the thing and what it's actually talking about, but once you sit down and start to pick at it a little bit, you realize that there is a lot of complexity hidden inside of that word. So I think prioritization, priorities are the same sort of experience. And I think there's this great article from John Cutler and I really, really agree with it. So we'll link to the article, but keep listening. I'm going to do my best to summarize what he sees as the four jobs of prioritization.
So one, it's about efficiency. So when we're talking about efficiency related priorities, you hear things like what can I drop, delegate, or delay? I don't need a new priority, I just need help reducing the noise. That is different from number two, leverage and effectiveness. In this flavor of prioritization, you're hearing things like, are we placing bets in the right places or are we just being busy? I don't want to just do things well. I want to do the right things. And ideally those things unlock value. So this is about are we doing the right things and we do the right thing that gives us much more leverage. Cool.
Third one, alignment and autonomy. So these are conversations about things. I know that I can make decisions, but I'm not confident that I see the bigger picture. I'd feel more comfortable making calls without escalating everything if we had shared context and clearer sense of direction. Also, a flavor of prioritization. I'm on a team, just tell me what the priorities are and I'll make sure that thing gets done. And then the last one, support, funding and commitment. So these are conversations where we're actually talking about resources being deployed, what are we prioritizing from a budget perspective, from a headcount perspective? And that also is often talked about as prioritization or we need to make something a priority. And when you mash all four of these together, no wonder prioritization conversations are some of the swirliest, weirdest-
Rodney Evans:
So wacky.
Sam Spurlin:
... unproductive conversations I've ever seen in organizations.
Rodney Evans:
Right. That's so interesting.
Sam Spurlin:
How did these hit you? Do you see this as well?
Rodney Evans:
I do, but what's interesting is I wouldn't have necessarily parsed out all four of them until you said it and then I'm like, "Oh, this does make a lot of sense."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah,
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think about prioritization as the filter of from everything we could do what we're going to do, but that is one view on it. And there are definitely these other views that are really interesting and I see way that they work together. It's like if you want to have less but better, you want to have reduced cognitive load and high focus, you want your workforce working on the most high value things for your end users or whatever, presumably that gets you more leverage, that gets you more alignment, that gets you clarity around how you allocate resources. But you could almost start from any of those four points as the on-ramp and work your way back to the other ones.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. Yeah. And not to make this the John Cutler pod, he digs into that a little bit. You can take these in different orders and depending on your strategic situation or your context, various ones make different sense. If you're in a software development team and you're totally locked up with overwhelming amount of stuff to do, maybe the first focus of your prioritization effort is actually just clearing some things out, just figuring out some things that you don't have to do. Or creating space and once you have space, you can be more deliberate about what is the highest leverage thing. Whereas in a totally different scenario, maybe as a senior leadership team where we're not really talking about cranking widgets, maybe we should be focused more on the leverage job of prioritization.
Why it’s so hard to stop doing lower value things
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I mean you're tapping right off the bat on something that I think is really important that I want to talk about, which is why people don't ever want to stop doing things. It's so rough to shut something down in a company. And I really want to talk about why because everybody says... I used to say all the time start by stopping and I've stopped saying it because nobody can do it. And I even see this at The Ready where a team that's really humming around an internal mission or something, we'll sort of finish the mission and be like, "What's next?" And it's like, no, dude, it's over.
Sam Spurlin:
No, you're done. You did it.
Rodney Evans:
You're done. And I am a really big fan when you have a cross-functional team in pursuit of a priority, when it is accomplished of disbanding no matter what. Even if that very same team is reassembled around a different mission in a week, I'm like, just stop. Fully` stop things. Why doesn't anybody want to do that and why doesn't anybody do that?
Sam Spurlin:
It's a great question and I was chuckling as you were talking because in my personal life, non-work, I love stopping things. Not having to do a thing, that sounds great. And I'm trying to think about what's the difference between that and then a work context.
I think in a lot of organizations, so much identity is wrapped up in the things that you are working on and in some ways stopping the thing that you are owning or contributing to, it's like a little death. It's like a little corporate death.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. It is.
Sam Spurlin:
And that's scary, especially if you are working in an organization where it could literally, not literally die, but your job goes away potentially.
Rodney Evans:
Right. Right.
Sam Spurlin:
If there's not this role fluidity that we talk about in more progressive organizations where it's not a big deal if the thing that you're working on goes away because you're just going to pick up another thing. There are lots of organizations where if your thing goes away, you go away. So of course nobody wants to admit to the organization even though they can admit to themselves that the thing I'm working on is not a priority, it probably should be stopped, but I'd like to keep getting a paycheck and feed my family, so let's keep the charade going.
Rodney Evans:
Let's keep this up. Yeah. I think that's a very reasonable take. There's also something that maybe is a little bit more murky under this that I notice, which is when we're doing something that probably could be de-prioritized because it's not getting the return that we think it should for whatever reason, I think it's very easy to say, "Oh. Well we'll stop doing that and we'll reinvest that energy or money or human attention in something else." And that feels, I feel like very cognitively sound thinking.
But I think the lived experience of that is much more like I'm swapping something that I know how to do for something that I have to learn how to do. And the space between I'm on a team or I'm working on a thing that I know how to do and is really humming and that I'm certain about. Regardless of the impact that it's having, I know how to do the job. The difference between that and now there's a really significant flash to bang between when I start this new adventure and when anything happens. I've had enough personal experience and experience with teams where they're like, "So we're basically giving up a sure thing, even if it's ineffective for a novel thing that could be ineffective?" And I just think that's a hard sell.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I can see that. I mean there's an element of sunk cost fallacy.
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
Everyone's favorite fallacy.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
The one fallacy everyone knows, sunk cost fallacy, because I think we can all-
Rodney Evans:
We do.
Sam Spurlin:
... we've all felt it
Rodney Evans:
And we feel it. Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
That's really interesting.
Sam Spurlin:
It's so interesting too because I think you can take something like complexity and the idea that an organization is a complex adaptive system and use that as justification why we should keep doing a thing forever. Well, we don't know what could happen. This thing could lead to the next thing that we really want to do. Why would we reduce the surface area to serendipity for a thing that we're doing as an organization? I think that's a flawed argument, but I can see how you could make it.
Rodney Evans:
This leads to something I wanted to talk to you about, which is I feel like corporate America, America we're just very binary beasts. It's like everybody's favorite trap to just be like, success or failure. There's only winning and losing and there's nothing else. We talk about the third way a lot in this podcast.
But I think in prioritization, to your exact point, Sam, it's like what I don't often see when say a mission is prioritized and there's a cross-functional team assembled around it is what would the signals of progress be so that before we get close to the end, we know whether we're on to something or not. And to your point, I think in complexity it can be very easy to manufacture signals of progress or to get wedded to things that are ultimately not really going to lead to outcomes. It can get very murky and I think all of us are really good at gathering evidence for why what we're doing is valuable and important. It can make it easy to justify continuing to do things even when we're overworked and we're burnt out and we're worried about the risk of dropping it. And, and, and, and, and. I just think it feels easier to pile on than to shed.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally agree. And I think underneath that is this unstated assumption, which may be just cultural to the US, and maybe more broadly, but definitely in the US, which is the success condition for anything, a project, a product, an organization, a company is forever. You do the thing forever or else you are a failed organization or you have a failed product or you have a failed initiative. And there are very few, maybe zero things that should exist forever from the drop of the hat. So maybe we can get a little bit more realistic about, well, what would actually be successful here? Maybe this thing won't exist forever and maybe we put an end date on it at the very beginning. Or to your point, we get really clear about what kind of signal we're looking at that tells us whether to keep it going or not. But there seems to be this, if you don't do something forever, it's a failure. Well then why would many of us stop anything and have to look at ourselves in the mirror and see a failure?
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly right. And I also think it's really easy to confuse good work for impactful work. I see a lot of projects happen in client organizations and it's not that the work that they're doing isn't high quality, it's not that it's not compelling in some way, it's just that it's not necessarily having the impact or getting the outcome that they want. And I think when you're prioritizing, you really have to parse those things. Obviously having impact and not having a high bar doesn't feel great in terms of the work product, but having a high bar and not having impact is just as bad. It's probably worse actually. If you can get the result but do a shite job, that's probably better actually than having your beautiful mind palace of knowledge work that nobody gives a shit about. But when we're talking about prioritization, I think it can be hard to separate those things and to be like, "But what is the job of this priority and did the work do that job?"
Sam Spurlin:
Well yeah, I mean that's just going back to we listed out four different jobs of priorities at the very beginning and perhaps there's some nuance there that we can just all start to bring to conversations that we are in around priorities, whether it's our own individual priorities in our life or our team or maybe for the strategy of an organization.
Different altitudes of priorities
Sam Spurlin:
And that is actually something that I wanted to bring up is that do you think it matters or how does it matter to think about the elevation that you are at in an organization with priorities? Because that's the other thing that always breaks my brain about priorities. Are we talking about me looking at my task list for the day and being like, "There's 30 things here and I'm going to do maybe 10. How am I going to prioritize those?" Versus a C-suite looking at their five-year strategy and being like, "All right, well what are our priorities? What are we going to tell the rest of the organization our priorities are?" And then anywhere kind of in between that very high and very low level.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, it's a really good question. My sort of lazy answer to this is I think there's too much focus on alignment of priorities and not enough focus on coherence. So if you're on the executive team, your job is real clarity around what is being pursued and how. I'm not a big fan of seeing executive teams just publish a single metric as the priority for the year because it just doesn't tell us a lot about how we're going to get that or what it's going to mean for our organization or why it's that number and not something else. I understand why that is the go-to, but I ultimately don't think it's ideal. And/but even as I say that, I do think that executive teams that can say very clearly it's these three things and not these three things for this year is incredibly helpful for the rest of the organization to either, on an individual level, on a team level, be thoughtfully contributing directly to one of those things or to be thoughtfully experimenting divergently from one of those things. But not to be doing stuff that the executive team has said, "Not these three."
Sam Spurlin:
Not going to do. Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Right. To not do the three from last year.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
And it's like, I think divergence and prioritization is really helpful at a team level, and especially when you have big systems, I think the fractal nature of this really comes into play. But what I often see is actually something in between, which is at the top level there's clear new priorities, at the team level, there's lagging work from old priorities and there's neither focus on the current nor intention around divergence. I think that's the worst of all worlds.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I think the thing that I wanted to say to build on this is that on the one hand, I don't know that there's a huge difference in the psychological experience of an organization setting priorities for itself and an individual figuring out what they're going to do for the day. And the thing that is interesting to me about the individual being really clear on their own prioritization is I feel like that muscle can be cultivated in the solo work of figuring out what am I doing and not doing today or this week? And I think that muscle can be redeployed in larger venues with your team, with the team of teams that you are a part of, with a leadership team if you are on it.
I just don't see how if you have a bunch of individuals on a leadership team who can't prioritize for shit in their personal life or on their individual level, suddenly being good at it as a team seems like that math ain't mathing. So at the very least, I think there's an interesting task in front of all of us to figure out what does it look like to get good at this as just people, if you have any sort of autonomy over what you're doing every day and you're not just, not that there's anything wrong with this, but getting tickets that tell you what your next priority is. If you have to exercise some volition to figure out what the next thing is, I think there's a lot of room for most of us to get better about being deliberate around that.
Where leaders mess up prioritization
Rodney Evans:
I love that. And to just take the other end of the spectrum in terms of the leadership team level, sometimes when I see leadership teams working on prioritization, what it looks like is each functional leader just naming their two and it becoming a grocery list of the 15 total. It's like there's five, everybody's got three, we've got 15, I think we're good.
Sam Spurlin:
Right. It was hard for me to come up with my three, so therefore this is a real prioritization list even though now there's 15.
Rodney Evans:
Really, I narrowed it down from 11, so that feels good.
But I think to get the kind of coherence that we're talking about the design work, the OS work that's required is to look at the 15 and think, what are the three things that these materially add up to? And if of the 15, seven of them don't have anything to do with those three, kill them. Because I think that there's something that happens in terms of capacity where, to your point of the math doesn't math, when every functional leader says, "We can get after all of this," and then the leadership team says, "Okay, that means it's all of this," operationally it's not.
They always think that there's more capacity than there is. And I don't know if this is because a lot of leadership teams that are setting strategies aren't in the operational day-to-day or they don't fully understand the sort of sluginess that exists in their orgs and what it requires to actually do something. But I've worked with so many D-level people in companies who are just like, "These dudes do not know what it takes to do the thing that they said to do. They think this is just like you can flip a switch on. This is six months of work for a team of 10. And that team of 10 has day jobs." There's just a little bit of a disconnect I think from reality sometimes.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I think that's right. And it makes me wonder then, well, what's the answer? Is it that leadership gets a better deeper technical understanding? I mean, yeah, maybe. Maybe it wouldn't hurt. But also I don't think we necessarily want all the C-suite leaders going back into the trenches and learning all the latest stuff.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, no.
Sam Spurlin:
It makes me think, well maybe then the answer is that actually that means that leadership team is setting priorities at the wrong level. If they're getting down into that level of specificity, I wonder what does it look like to be one level up from that about what are the general bets that we are setting? And then let the folks who really have the technical expertise really figure out what part of that they can get after, what it looks like to get after a certain slice of that rather than just making shit up and declaring it so as if that is what it takes to actually make things happen.
Continuous steering version of priorities
Rodney Evans:
I love that. While we're sort of on the steering thing, I also think there's the other version of this which you mentioned. And my curiosity was really piqued because it just felt intuitively so right on. That there is a difference between we're big advocates for continuous steering and it doesn't mean not prioritizing, and we just talked about what not to do in terms of just creating the ever-growing list of boxes to be checked that are not tethered to reality in any meaningful way. So what is the continuous steering version of this?
Sam Spurlin:
That's a great question and I put it on our board here, not because I had any answers, but I was hoping maybe you had some. But I'll take a swing at this.
Rodney Evans:
Take a swing.
Sam Spurlin:
There is a world where you look at us talking about continuous steering and you're basically saying, "What? So you just, at the whims of things happening around you, change the course of action that you're on?" And obviously that's not what we mean by continuous steering, but I think it's harder to give a positive definition of it. Where I'm landing in this moment is that when I think about continuous steering on an initiative or in a strategy, the continuous part is more on the sense-making and then the slight modifications that often that sense-making is pointing at.
So I don't think continuous steering is like first we're going hard to the left. Like, oh shit. Now we're going hard to the right. The continuous steering is happening in a more gradual way, and when you're making those continuous steering movements over a long period of time, you can move really far. I mean, think about riding a bike or driving a boat and slight modifications over a long period of time. You are well in a different direction than you were originally, but only having to make slight adjustments along the way. I think that's where I land right now and what that means for priorities is that we're not throwing our priorities out every quarter and starting from a blank piece of paper, we are starting with what we have, incorporating new information that we have learned over the course of that quarter or whatever the timeframe is, stuff from the sky, but also stuff that we have learned in the pursuit of those priorities.
Rodney Evans:
In pursuit. Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
We have learned what is working, what isn't working, a better way to get after a thing. We incorporate that into our prioritization and now we are on a slightly different course. And doing that over time I think leads to better outcomes. I don't know, what do you think? Different take?
Rodney Evans:
I don't think it is a different take, but what you're making me think of is I wish that priorities were named as hypotheses.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I was talking to someone who was a former client a little while ago, and there's a strategic requirement to increase number of users of the product, which is not terribly uncommon in this here capitalism.
Sam Spurlin:
You got a product and you sell it to people who want more of them.
Rodney Evans:
We need more people to buy it. Yeah, it turns out it's a tale as old as time. And there are some real flaws in the basic functionality of this product. I say this because when you need to have more users, there are a variety of levers that you can pull. You can do more marketing, you can lower the pricing, you can create incentives. You can do all manner of things, you can buy your competitors. There's lots and lots of moves out there in the playbook that you can try doing. And this particular leader was like, "I am taking the perspective that if we basically shored up the fundamental functionality of this product, it would solve our problem. And that we should do less on legal, sales, marketing, pricing, ops, whatever, and do more on what is essentially the infrastructure of the product so that customers hate it less. This to me-
Sam Spurlin:
Maybe even like it at some point.
Rodney Evans:
We'll see.
Sam Spurlin:
They're shooting for the stars.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, right? Aim high. This to me is a very provocative and interesting priority phrase as a hypothesis. Because the priority on its own would just be more customers, but the hypothesis is we believe we can get more customers through a better user experience with our core functionality. So we're going to focus there.
And one of the things that both you and I talked about in the prep for this is sometimes things like that take time. And I think in publicly held companies, there's so much pressure to meet earnings expectations and to report quarterly, and if you have a large organization and you have a large footprint, your customers might not notice an increase in quality within a quarter and that might not translate to better NPS and more users in a quarter. That doesn't mean that the hypothesis is wrong though. And it also doesn't mean it's the only one. If we play out this scenario, maybe you also have a hypothesis around pricing. Maybe you also have a hypothesis around breaking into a new region. Maybe you also have a hypothesis about a new feature. But I sort of like the idea of testing priorities as hypotheses because it feels easier to steer that way than just saying, "Take that hill. Go fucking take it."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I love what you just said there.,And I think to add a little bit to it, having hypotheses that have different payoff windows.
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
So some of those pay windows are quarterly and we do expect things to happen quarterly and they're not the entirety of our bet portfolio. We do have some of these larger bets. And I think pairing the larger bets with the shorter bets takes a lot of the pressure off of those longer term bets. We can admit what they are. We know that they're not going to change anything in the quarter and we're not asking them to do that, and yet we still think they are important.
Rodney Evans:
And it also relates to something else I thought about, which is just in prioritization, you're going to have stuff that's incremental and you're going to have stuff that's innovative. And I think what's important is there's the timescale and then there's the significance of the priority. Just being really clear that you're placing bets on both. And not all of our bets are just on short-term incremental buoys because those things, they're not necessarily bad ideas. And also it's very easy to mortgage the long term for the short term. And also it's very easy to have too many people doing too many small things that get lost in the fog of war and don't ultimately add up to anything. But I think just the mindset of what is the timescale, what is the effort, what is the impact? I just think all teams, for our own sanity, need to understand what variables we're considering when we are prioritizing.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. It's just all coming back to that idea of that prioritization is a nuanced thing. We should be very careful about just calling something a priority with no explanatory text of what actually we're talking about. And when you start to pull apart the different elements of it, as you just did, we get to just be much more precise about what it is that we're actually talking about, what do we expect to happen? And when we have that greater nuance that allows us to do that continuous steering better because we have more things that we're looking at other than good or bad? Worked or no? Well, no, there's gradations of gray across three or four different criteria that we can get signal from and decide what that means for the overall package of the priority itself.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. I feel it's pushing against the edge of wanting to talk about the things to do instead.
Rodney Evans:
Me too. We want to do it. Yeah, let's do-
Sam Spurlin:
We want to make it better.
Rodney Evans:
... let's do the ideas to help people rather than just talking about all the ways that this goes wrong all the time.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Rodney, why don't you help someone. Give someone an idea. What's your favorite idea on this little list we got here?
Tip 1: Use a variant of WSJF for your own variables
Rodney Evans:
Well, my favorite idea is I am very WSJF ride or die. I've talked about it on this show before.
Sam Spurlin:
What does WSJF stand for?
Rodney Evans:
It stands for weighted shortest job first. And it comes from Agile.
Sam Spurlin:
WSJF. Is that what you call it?
Rodney Evans:
WSJF.
Sam Spurlin:
WSJF?
Rodney Evans:
People do call it WSJF.
Sam Spurlin:
All right.
Rodney Evans:
And it comes from Agile, and the point is not to necessarily do it the Agile way because that's meant to evaluate feature requests and things like that.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, it comes more from a software development Agile.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly.
Sam Spurlin:
But usable more broadly.
Rodney Evans:
It is. And here's basically the process that I've used in several different contexts. I've used this on an individual level around all of the jobs that I've been doing at various points, and now I'm going to talk about doing it at an organizational level. So here's how I did this not that long ago that I found to be very effective. We created design principles. The team generated a whole ton of possible ideas, at the priority level, but also really at the project level to get us toward those design principles. And then it was time to evaluate what we were going to actually do because we couldn't do too many. And the rubric that we created, which we followed the WSJF format, but just with different columns basically rather than shortest and whatever, were these. Short-term financial impact, long-term strategic impact, feasibility, investment required and strategic alignment.
We created a definition for each of those and we created a weighting for each of those. And then for each of the projects, we evaluated them. We scored them against those five categories. The way that I set it up was I had each team member score them separately so that there was one aggregate number. And then you could just sort it. And rather than looking across 50 ideas that could be prioritized, we sorted it by the weighted score. We picked a cutoff point and we basically said, "We're going to do these ten first and the other 40 we're going to do later or never." And this is imperfect, but even getting into the conversation about what we are designing for and what the variables are is more than I see a lot of people do.
Sam Spurlin:
What the weights are.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, and what the weights are, which is actually the most important right now. Is more than I see a lot of people do. And I just find it a way to tame the complexity of we have an opportunity or we have a challenge. No bad ideas in brainstorming. Now what?
Sam Spurlin:
And whatever rises to the top. It would be interesting if your gut was like, "I don't like these. What is it about this way that we just did it that raised these ones that I'm reacting to?" And we can decide, all right, is there something that we need to pay attention to in our intuition or do we trust the process? That was pretty logical to have given us a good answer. I think it leads to cool conversations.
Rodney Evans:
And you know what's really interesting, Sam, having done this a bunch of times with a bunch of different teams that I'm on and that I'm working with? It almost always is the inverse of what you just said, which is things we really like are at the bottom. A lot of times people's darlings, people's ideas, their perfect little precious princess ideas do not rise to the top. And that ends up being a really interesting conversation when it's like, I haven't had the experience yet where the thing that's in the top three, everybody's like, "Ugh, that's garbage." But I have had the experience where people are like, "Oh, wow, that thing that I thought was really important is last."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
"Why is that?"
Sam Spurlin:
And when I look at my ratings, I even rated it pretty bad. It wasn't just all of you poo pooed on my idea.
Rodney Evans:
Yes. Exactly, exactly. Which is why I think doing something like this, it's a pretty light lift to get you a bunch of data.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. All right, cool.
Rodney Evans:
All right, what you got?
Tip 2: Shift from saying “no” to “not right now”
Sam Spurlin:
All right, so we go from the incredibly practical, here's a tool and I'm going to run you through how to use it to a philosophical thing.
Rodney Evans:
Love it.
Sam Spurlin:
We'll say not now instead of no. This has been one that I have used a lot for myself. I think there is a vast psychological gulf between saying, "I am never or not going to do this thing," and, "I'm not going to do this thing right now." And the result I think is actually the same. You're not doing the thing in this period of time. Great, that's what we're shooting for with prioritization. And if just saying not now is enough to get you over the hump to admit that you're not going to do a thing, then use that as the criteria rather than, "No, we're not going to do this."
And what this looks like for me is that I have really robust someday maybe list. It comes from GTD. And the someday maybe list I will throw things onto and I have a quarterly rhythm of going back and seeing if I want to rescue anything off of it. But I know that if I'm not going to do a thing and I throw it in the someday maybe list, it's not gone forever. I can always come back to it, but at least it's out of sight for now and I can focus on the actual priorities. And I think it can work at a more than individual level as well.
Rodney Evans:
I think this is great one. And my version of this has been, let's just pause this for now, which feels similarly not like let's kill it. We're not going to murder it, we're just going to put it to sleep for a little bit.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Well, the funny thing is funny too-
Rodney Evans:
And that feels better.
Sam Spurlin:
I know.
Rodney Evans:
It's just going to take a little nap.
Sam Spurlin:
It is better and my brain knows this trick. My brain knows that not now really means no.
Rodney Evans:
Really means never.
Sam Spurlin:
And even though it knows it, it still works. It's still okay with it. And I think my brain knows if we pause a thing, we are unlikely to restart it. However, there are enough cases where we do restart a paused thing where my brain can be like, "Okay, this is legit. I can let it go."
Rodney Evans:
That's so funny. It is true. It's like even when we know the tricks, they still work.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Brains are silly like that.
Rodney Evans:
Brains are stupid.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. All right. What do you got? Number two? Number two for you?
Tip 3: Visualize your work to “see” deprioritization
Rodney Evans:
We've talked a lot about visualizing work on this show and using kanbans, working in public. I still have teams resist this sometimes, which is so hard for me to understand because I just cannot function without having work in a place that I can see it. So it's a little bit of a pre-req to assume that you believe that in-flight work should be written down and visible and shared in a team. But assuming that you do, I think that paying particular attention to when things are not updated week on week or in each meeting. And just noticing that not from an accountability perspective and finger wagging putative, but just to be like, "Is this not happening? Because we don't really care anymore?" Because usually what's going on, it usually is low-key failed or it is practically deprioritized, even if it is Sunshine Zone still prioritized. And it's like use that kind of mechanism just to notice what isn't really getting a lot of action and then propose tossing that thing into the backlog or into the someday maybe list instead.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Totally. I mean, I think what you're pointing to is priorities often have a way of revealing themselves if we let them have a way to show us that.
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
And visualizing your work is a great way to see what your priorities actually are. And you may be surprised by what the visualization actually tells you about your priorities.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly right.
Sam Spurlin:
That's what a calendar is basically, right? Your calendar is a way of visualizing your work, and if you've ever done an audit of your last month of your calendar or given somebody else your calendar and asked them like, "All right, what do you think my priorities are based on my calendar?" Usually they tell you a thing that you probably are not telling yourself.
Rodney Evans:
Right. That's so interesting. All right, Sam, bring us home.
Tip 4: Openly talk about conflicting priorities
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Last one. So what I have written down here is talk about when priorities are in conflict. This is a thing that I feel like I've seen very few organizations do well. I've worked with various organizations where there are lots of Sunshine Zone things about what the priorities are, and inevitably those priorities, when we are trying to work toward them, will come in conflict with each other. And I think if we do not have a practice of really talking about, "Hey, this thing that we said is important is coming up against this thing that we said is important, let's work through that and figure it out." I think you have created an environment where prioritization or priorities have much less usefulness than they could.
And this is why the idea of the even over I think is really powerful. And I'm realizing I should have written even overs in here as the actual takeaway, but even over does a good job of pre-committing us to a certain priority, this good thing, this priority, even over this other potential priority. And landing on even overs that feel toothy and accurate and a little scary maybe is a way to make priorities come to life and start to navigate those conflicts. I just feel like this comes from having been in too many environments where people are like, there's a lot of back channel conversation about I don't understand. I'm being told to do this priority from this VP and I'm told to do this priority from this VP and they don't go together-
Rodney Evans:
Which is it?
Sam Spurlin:
What am I supposed to do about that?
Rodney Evans:
Right. Right. I love that. Yeah. And I think just the idea of actually having that conversation out loud and transparently is something that, to your point, doesn't happen enough and tends to happen in the hallway or in the DM.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. Because I think there's often a tinge of somebody did something wrong or somebody's in trouble because our priorities aren't lining up. And I think that's an unreasonable expectation to have a handful of priorities that are purely, totally separate from each other in a complex environment. I think it's probably more common that we do create conflicts, and that is why I think it is healthier to think about prioritization as this ongoing conversation that we dip into and out of as we need to, rather than this event that we do quarterly or yearly or whenever, where all the prioritization for the entire quarter or the entire year happens, which is just nonsensical really, when you think about how quickly things change.
Rodney Evans:
That feels like a good place for us to wrap. We are always looking for new topics, so if you've got a pattern that you're having trouble changing, email podcast[at]theready[dot]com. This show is engineered by Taylor Marvin and produced by our friend Jack Van Amburg. At Work with The Ready is created by The Ready where we help organizations around the world change the way that they work. Thank you so much for listening.