When priorities are lacking

A chess player in a simultaneous display. His real competitor is not among his opponents. His attention drops. What is he doing here?

Busy, busy, busy. With what? And why?
This is the condition of people, groups and whole organizations without clear priorities. Why don’t people have clear priorities? There are so many causes that it is a wonder that some people do have them.

1. There is no time to think through priorities. This is a recursive one, a vicious circle in itself.
2. Having no time is an excuse not to think through priorities. Whenever it seems frightening to face the facts.
3. Incompetent bosses give all the time conflicting demands or come with ever new priorities. Often they suffer under bosses like themselves. As competent people don’t stay under such circumstances, only the incompetent, the indifferent and the anxious people stay.
4. Lack of delegation means that bosses run from one incident to the next one. When extinguishing one fire, another flames up already. Some people wait almost ion purpose for crises to develop, because they don’t have an inkling what to do if there is no crisis. Crises may give people the idea they are important, needed. And they may give them the probably mistaken belief they are alive.
5. Some people have a body that is not suitable for a sitting life. They need to move, even physically, so they arrange for working conditions that make it necessary to move around.
6. Many people have a time-span that is too short for their job. They are busy pulling plants up to make them grow faster.
7. If you are very busy, people are discouraged from asking disturbing questions like what the effectiveness or the efficiency is of what you are doing. Or even worse: what the purpose is what you are doing.
8. Increasing performance with present capability is more difficult, less tangible and slower than cutting costs. That can be calculated easily, if you don’t think too much ahead. Decreasing capability gives a lot of stress: fear to be the next to become redundant, more work to do, getting less support, anger about arbitrariness, blindness and injustice.
9. When everybody is running around, the few people who are calm and concentrated are envied and should be entrusted with extra work. It is unfair. They should be snowed under as soon as possible.
10. Priorities don’t help without posteriorities: not doing the nonessential. That requires courage - and judgment. Bureaucracies don’t like those. Not making mistakes is safer than trying to accomplish the worthwhile.

So what can we do about all this? How can we establish priorities in the middle of a priorities graveyard?

1. By establishing priorities group-wise, not individually, by the people responsible and directly involved.
2. By concentrating on the one or two priorities that dwarf all others: core issue analysis.
3. By giving the core priorities evocative labels that stick.

In my experience this rarely takes more than three days. One day to make the longlist, one day to boil the longlist down to the core issues, and one day for the strategy of dealing with those issues and farming them out to the right people. The first and the third day can be done by a sample of the people involved. The second day has to involve as many key people involved in the area under consideration as possible, including the ones that are actually going to execute the work involved.
This is an investment in collective mind power that will increase effective mind power amply, often incredibly.
One or two outsiders, like consultants, are usually needed to ensure a fresh perspective on worn-out issues.

Planning and policy are handmaidens, execution is the king.

I read something that made me pause my series about systemic organization problems. I was reading Churchill's History of the Second World War, when I came across a passage that was right out of my own heart. (My managerial heart, that is.)

From Volume 4, Chapter XXXI: Suspense and Strain:
(Sir Stafford Cripps, the Lord Privy Seal,  proposed) … that as Minister of Defence I should have associated with me, as advisers, three persons of the calibre of the Chiefs of Staff who would supervise the Joint Planning Staffs and would be free to devote the whole of their time to military planning in its broadest sense. These three were to form an independent War Planning Directorate, which would keep under review the whole strategy of the war and consider all future operations; and for these purposes they were to supersede the Chiefs of Staff Committee. In each theatre of war there would be a single Commander with full power over all the naval, land, and air forces. These Commanders, advised by a small joint staff, would be responsible directly to the War Planning Directorate. …

This was in truth a planner's dream.

The new Directorate, concerned solely with planning and armed with full powers of direction and control, would be free to go its way without distraction by the daily cares which beset the Chiefs of Staff in controlling the forces over which they exercised command. These manifold cares would continue to be left to the Chiefs of Staff and the staffs which served them in their individual and collective capacities, while the supreme command elaborated its strategy and plans in splendid isolation.

I judged (the proposals) to be misconceived in theory and unworkable in practice. The guiding principle of war direction is, in my opinion, that war plans should be formulated by those who have the power and the responsibility for executing them. Under the system which we had evolved in the hard school of experience the need for inter-Service planning was fully met by the Chiefs of Staff committee and its subordinate bodies, in which those carrying the responsibility for execution came together to make jointly the plans which they were to carry out. The establishment of a War Planning Directorate divorced from the Service staffs responsible for action would have been vicious in principle, for it would have created two rival bodies, one responsible and one irresponsible, yet both nominally of equal status. It would have confronted Ministers with the constant need to disregard the advice of one or other of these bodies. It would have led at once to immediate and violent friction. Was an admiral to be appointed to the Planning Directorate with power to tell the First Lord how to move the Fleet, or an air marshal "of equal calibre" to criticise by implication the Chief of the Air Staff? It was easy to see the dangers and antagonism inherent in such a system. Any clever person can make plans for winning a war if he has no responsibility for carrying them out. Such ingenuity and resource is to be encouraged in the members of planning staffs, so long as they are definitely and effectively subordinated in status to the Service chiefs who carry the executive responsibility.

Of course, planning needs some distance from execution, but not divorced from it. In our government departments we have whole hordes of civil servants responsible for 'policy,' without experience with practical execution and not under, but above those responsible for real work and real results under real conditions. It is difficult to imagine something more diseased than policy makers and planners removed from immediate reality and immediate responsibility. Are you too sensitive to be a salesperson? Go into marketing. And if you are too sensitive for marketing, go into public relations.  
The old saying is: Those who can, do, those who cannot, teach. We could say as well: Those who can, do, those who cannot, formulate policies.

My favorite sentence in the quote above: Any clever person can make plans for winning a war if he has no responsibility for carrying them out.