A pause to reflect on Prioritisation aka Time Management

“Water flows in the direction of downhill”, means that we prefer to do the things we prefer - because we have skill and/or interest to do them.

I love these seemingly simple single word words like “prioritisation” which seem to mask several layers of what it means to be a human being. Even double word labels like "human being" is an over-simplification - we’re made of several energy sources, bacterias, organisms, viruses, cells, and much more - basically millions/billions/trillions of structures, relationships, dependencies, interfaces and communication paths between them, forming a cooperative that is not fully aware of itself. Ever really, really seen the back of your elbow, or your neck? Are you SURE it is really there?

Come on, try something - try get your heart to beat on your conscious demand. Unless you’re an extremely trained and practiced guru yogi, no one else really seems able to. Or try something simpler - hold your breath until you can’t. Something re-asserts. Something wants to live, and overrules your thought to hold your breath. Okay, so some people - usually young folks - hold their breath until they blackout, AND THEN that part that wants to live, forces breathing again. 

There really is something else going on out of reach of the conscious mind.

So now we’re ready to get into prioritisation.

How hard is it to pick a strategy to follow?

How hard is it to choose to turn left or right, when you just do not know?

Or to pick a candy in a candy store when you have not tried them all and can only buy 1?

Letting go of one or more options is incredibly hard - one of those might be “the one!” and you lost, you chose to lose, that option. That’s inviting anxiety, terror, worry, tension, unhappiness, confusion and a myriad other difficult emotions to carry. It’s vulnerability. What if you are wrong?

Of course … life carries on, and likely you will never find out that you were wrong. It’s also likely that you do find out AND there’s still time to change your mind. But according to the Principles of Persuasion - the principle of consistency, sticking to our previous decision basically, has a nasty subconscious way of not letting us change our minds, even to the detriment of ourselves sometimes. Awareness, self awareness, and awareness of as much as possible is really helpful!

So ultimately, in a competitive landscape, the ones choosing and moving, and learning, and being quicker, have more luck (luck == opportunity meets preparation) than those who are not choosing. It’s better to prioritise and know that you’re working on priority 1, then moving to priority 2 which becomes priority 1, than try to do 20 things all at once. For many reasons and many models and many simulations. Topics for  other posts perhaps.

There is no procrastination… there’s just choice which might be trapped. How would you know? You learn more about yourself, and you look at ways of self development to help you grow your self awareness. You make one decision, and take one small step in the direction of achieving the thing that is most important, not the easiest thing. Time management, is a reflection of what you actually believe is important.

Here’s a quick test of your self awareness (which is also a self development exercise, so reflect, take notes, and review again later for more reflections):

   Compare what you would do if you were a life-saving surgeon and two unconscious 40 year old men arrived in your emergency room. Both had exactly the same wound, the same prognosis to live or die if they received your life saving care or not. You need to begin immediately for one of these patients to live. Unfortunately whoever is not operated on will die.

How do you choose?

Now, consider: one of the men is the Siddhartha Gautama (aka) Buddhai and the other man is … Elon Musk.

These kinds of questions cause all sorts of known information to surface, and all sorts of beliefs too. Sometimes comfortable and sometimes not. But the more awareness you have of all of your inner world(s), the more you begin to truly understand prioritisation.

Notice what happens when you change the names to Elon Musk and Bill Gates (both at 40!!); Elon Musk and Neil Armstrong? Minnie Mouse or Mickey Mouse? (yes cartoons characters are real too!). And so on. As many names, genders, ages, people close to you, people far away from you. See what comes up for you as you consider these impossible choices. Many personal values, beliefs, attitudes, and more will come up the more you do this simple exercise.

A related aside:

Strategising and selecting strategy is the art of saying “No” to many options, to reduce scope, which reduces complexity essentially. This increases probability of success - as there are fewer variables you need to consider, to balance, to get to success.

Planning and committing is the art of turning the goals and constraints that result from strategy selection, into the art of the possible, which then increasingly becomes a new reality - the future.

Prioritisation is deciding which variables you’re going to work with now, and which you will work with later. The fewer variables it turns out, the easier it is to do this with much less anxiety and greater chances of success. Both complexity and psychological safety matter in this space, a lot!

In effect, explicit and strongly (enough) held boundaries between things, make more safety and less complexity possible, thus less stress and much more creativity can occur within those safe spaces. Boundaries == safety, safe to be together and try unknown things together. 

A pause to reflect on Complexity

Or, as a friend of mine says it: “no one really understands complexity!"

Some foundation ideas:

1. There is some complexity in everything, everyone, everywhere, everywhen, and everyhow - at a certain point you cannot reduce complexity further, no matter what you do
2. To deal with complexity, we need to find a new perspective, this simplification
3. There is great stress relief whenever we are able to find and act on simplifying anything that is complex. And relieving stress is always better for health.
4. As the number of variables increases, so does complexity
5. As the number of variations/changes in those variables increases, so does complexity
6. As the frequency/speed of changes in those variables increases, so does complexity
7. Complexity is cause-and-effect but it reaches a point where we cannot reliably predict the effects (desirable and unintended, undesirable) of a cause; so too there is a point where we cannot reliably identify root causes of an effect we observe
8. Complexity is not evil, it just is
9. For anything to be really interesting to us / people / individuals we need a balance of certainty and uncertainty - else it gets boring and non-rewarding
10. Complexity rises exponentially, so 1 unit of complexity added to another 1 unit of complexity equals more than 2 units, maybe 3 (probably), but maybe also 4 or 5 units. Who can tell? Certainly not beforehand!
11. An individual person can only handle / cope with / manage so much complexity. Once their “buffers” are full, that’s it. And each person’s max complexity management is unique
12. A high performance team can cope with more complexity, than the individual members can independently. Teams cope better with, and cope with more complexity than groups. And groups too, can sometimes cope with more than individuals operating alone do. Synergy is really a thing.
13. Yes, VUCA - volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity is a useful acronym to use to help you identify your assessment of a situation
14. Yes, the Stacey Matrix is also useful in software and other complex spaces.
15. Yes, the Cynefin model is also useful in complex spaces.

Anecdote 1: 

“Complicated is like a diesel submarine - we know a lot about submarines, and given a submarine we could pull it all apart, making carefully detailed plans, and once all apart, we could reassemble it using our plans and all the pieces we have. Complexity however is like mayonnaise … it does not matter how you slice, dice and analyse mayonnaise, you still have mayonnaise”

1. You will never be able to return mayonnaise to its original ingredients (egg yolks, salt, pepper, mustard, oil, vinegar/lemon juice) by analysing it, decomposing it, slicing it or dicing it
2.  You could take mayonnaise into a lab and chemically and with heat do something with it, to produce protein, water, acid, some salts, some carbon, and a few other chemicals - but you will not get the ingredients again. And it cost you a lot of time and money to get there. And with these more basic “ingredients” you will not be able to reconstruct the mayonnaise you had - something will have been lost.

Anecdote 2:

“Simple is like me tying my shoelaces. I have been doing this for more than 4 decades, I am quite comfortable and confident to do the action. If a project manager or sponsor asked me for a time (which is also cost) estimate, I could easily say “30 seconds approximately” and be believable, believed and probably get the budget to complete the project on time, on budget, right scope and right quality.

Complicated is like me tying the shoelaces of a room of 16-20 people. When I estimate “30 seconds per person, plus 5-15 seconds to move between people, plus a buffer of 10% of the total estimate to cater for unfamiliar shoe or shoestring options and also for 5% for some fatigue” - is also believable, and can be believed, might need to be negotiated a little to understand and cater for risks, might be considered a bit expensive but overall, probably a goer and could get budget to complete this complicated project on time or earlier, on budget or cheaper, right scope, and also right quality.

Then there is complexity. That’s like me being asked to tie the shoelaces of everyone in the corporate headquarters building. Multiple floors, multiple rooms, thousands of people. Other variables show up quickly “What if people leave before I reach them? What if people arrive after I left that space? What if everyone goes home before I am done? Or I break my fingers, knees or back? Or someone accidentally kicks me in the face and breaks my nose or glasses?” and many many more “What if?” questions arise. Faced with all this, the estimate I create could be extremely large, the caveats wide reaching, and the buffers enormous, and so usually the project is abandoned before it is funded or started. Good business!

However, in complexity there is risk of failure AND also possibility of success and reward! It’s a bit of anxiety AND excitement. And when we are in the right balance of psychological safety, and subjected to the energies of anxiety and excitement, sometimes we get an insight, and inspiration to do something previously not thought or considered. For example … locking the whole building and installing me at the 1 open door / security access point. That way everyone entering has well tied shoelaces, guaranteed. And we can measure progress rate. If it is too slow, and the sponsor deems that the project must be done regardless, suddenly we have the accurate business case of how many more people to hire, and how many more points to open. As the queue outside the building, block, whole neighbourhood dwindles, we can get pretty specific about when we will finish at the current rate of progress, and even begin to figure out when we can start rolling people off the project to save costs.

And .. this is the agile project management approach, in case you were wondering where I got this from :-) Years of training people to understand complexity and why agility mindsets are very useful to have! We find innovation arises more frequently from complex problem spaces, requiring complex solutions, when such contexts are managed according to the principles of change and resolution.

Simple projects are best executed like we did such projects before - very efficiently and effectively, basically rinse and repeat - the essence of manufacturing and traditional project management methods such as APMP and PRINCE2 (projects in controlled environments). Complicated projects are sometimes best suited to traditional project management methods, and sometimes to agile project management methods - it depends on who is available, what they know, and what else is really available - beliefs and experience do matter.