Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you find it challenging to prioritize tasks and problems in your organization? Do you have a good method for handling shifting priorities and keeping on top of the right things? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills.

I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves putting the concepts of the previous episodes together in practice so that you can better prioritize problem resolution and be more effective using a framework to help you analyze your work.

In some ways, the past three episodes represent a cycle: shape a problem, break it into smaller wins, and hold yourself and your team accountable for achieving those wins. And if you don’t achieve them, take a look at why and shape a new problem if necessary. This ongoing act of triage should be perpetual in any organization.

Problems and challenges big and small crop up all the time. Priorities change. Ideally, these things are being handled at appropriate levels and only the right ones escalate to you as a leader. But how do you set yourself and your team up to succeed? In my experience, there’s a spectrum of behavior in organizations represented by two extremes.

Hiding from problems on the one hand, or taking on everything that comes their way on the other hand. But both of these types represent an inability to prioritize because either nothing is urgent or everything is urgent, which I’ve said in a previous episode effectively means nothing is urgent. Problem prioritization is a discipline that can only be executed well with vision clarity. Becoming adept at differentiating between the essential and distraction takes practice and can benefit from a framework to help you think it through. And that’s what I’m going to provide in this episode. There are two key factors to consider in prioritizing the problems you tackle.

First is impact. The impact on our ability to reach our vision, or how much forward motion towards our vision is gained by resolving the problem. And the second factor is effort. How much effort will it take to resolve the problem? And with that, you can imagine laying these two factors out as axes that shape four quadrants.

There is the low impact / high effort, low impact / low effort, high impact / high effort, and high impact / low effort problems. With that, I’ll talk about each of these a little bit. So first is the low impact / high effort problems. Start with this, it should be the easiest one ’cause I label this quadrant “Deprioritize”.

So essentially we shouldn’t be addressing things here. In general, I try to avoid putting a lot of effort into something that has minimal impact. And this is low impact, but high effort. So if you categorize something here, I’d strongly recommend you check to see if it is truly a problem. Is it something that’s getting in the way of realizing your vision?

Now, this category can sometimes contain very interesting challenges, things we might find enjoyable to spend our time on, but we have to be honest with ourselves about the low impact part of it, especially knowing things in this quadrant are high effort.

So the second category to consider are the low impact / low effort, and I’ll label this quadrant “Opportunistic”. In general, you’ll want to prioritize higher impact work, but it’s worth going deeper on items in this quadrant as long as they are not zero impact or negative impact. A low impact, low effort item could be a small win if the effort is commensurate with the impact, but the larger the gap between effort and impact, where the effort is more than the impact seems worth, the more likely this item should be moved into the “Deprioritize” quadrant. On the other hand, a low but not zero impact item that can be addressed in minutes, for example, should likely be handled in short order. The gray area in between, not worth it and easily done requires deeper analysis against what other day-to-day work is in flight and what other problems might need more attention.

The third category are the high impact / high effort, and I think of this as the “Strategize” quadrant, meaning that there’s likely work here worth addressing because of the high impact, but you need to be thoughtful about it because of the high effort. The high impact nature of items that you put here means it’s important to get the right perspective.

And the reason I approach this group with a certain amount of caution is that anything that is high effort will typically have multiple potential points of failure and more so than something that’s low effort. Also, you can find that with some analysis, you might be able to make a little less effort and yield nearly the same impact.

This gets back to the idea of carving rocks out of boulders that I talk about in episode 10 of season two, and the notion of small wins that I talked about a few episodes ago. So this means looking at opportunities in the high effort / high impact quadrant for breaking this high effort work into smaller chunks of lower effort work that still have some impact, and move them into the high impact / low effort or low impact / low effort quadrants and reprioritize from there.

Now I recognize the possibility that the smallest effort problem to address may still be relatively high effort and there’s no way to break it down. If you’re confident that this is the case, then the last bit of analysis to strategize around with these items is to consider that even though an item might have the single biggest impact of anything on your list, an equivalent total effort can yield more impact through small effort wins from another quadrant.

And if that’s the case, you should still postpone addressing this item.

And the fourth and final category are the high impact / low effort items, and this I think of as the “High Priority” quadrant. In general, this is where you want to focus most of your and your team’s time as effort here will generate the most forward motion. If you have a lot of these items, you’ll of course still need to prioritize them based on impact, but also on your organization’s ability to get them done, which could be more than just effort. It can be a factor of resource availability, funding, and so forth. But ideally, you want as much of the work you and your team focus on to be in this quadrant, high impact / low effort, as possible. It seems kind of obvious to say that, but success requires a sort of almost ruthlessness in how you apply this analysis across these four quadrants. We often end up fooling ourselves into thinking the things we want to do belong in this quadrant, high impact / low effort. So how to apply this matrix, this thinking, these axes. This framework is really intended to be a process and that it’s not simply a one and done analysis. Just the act of achieving a small win can have an impact on the relative effort and value of everything else on your list. So you, if you don’t reanalyze, you might still be faced with the wrong priorities.

The flip side is you don’t want to get buried in re-analysis constantly in that analysis paralysis. So you need to find that right cadence of analysis to be able to be successful with this. And also understand that the quadrants I’ve described are somewhat conceptual and really are used as a thought exercise to help you analyze the work in front of you, although you can certainly actually map out your work, your projects, your problems, your challenges across these quadrants.

So to help with this exercise of analysis, I’ll describe the two axes in a little bit more detail, both of which can be thought of as a spectrum. So first is the impact axis running from no impact to high impact. For the purposes of this analysis, I consider higher impact things that produce more forward motion or removes more friction that is preventing forward motion. In other words, impact is ultimately measured in terms of achieving outcomes outlined in your vision. In general, you should favor higher impact over lower impact work of relatively equal effort, but it’s worth noting that some problems might seem low impact, but if resolving them unlocks higher impact work, you should consider it higher impact for what it can enable. Now, having said that, you should spend less time analyzing lower impact work in general, particularly if it’s on the higher effort end of the scale. Which brings us to the second axis, the effort axis, running from low effort to high effort.

In this analysis, you can think of effort as time, but it might be number of people, a dollar cost, a spreadsheet cost, required skills, logistics, or any other kind of resource usage, whatever applies to you. The scale itself should be really viewed as a relative scale for analysis.

So working through the analysis on this axis is all about trying to break things on the higher end of the spectrum into lower effort work, but only take the time if the real relative impact is there. A big benefit of breaking things into smaller effort work is that it enables a greater frequency of reevaluating your priorities.

Now, I’ve run across advice a lot that you should tackle the hardest problems first. Unfortunately, hardest is often conflated with most time consuming and “tackling” is often conflated with address in its entirety. So perhaps the intent here should be to analyze high effort / high impact work first, but break it down and prioritize it appropriately.

And that gets to the last challenge in any prioritization model, whatever your method might be, be it this framework or something else. And that’s being honest with yourself about actual and relative effort. Of course, you should also be honest with yourself about the relative impact as well, but ultimately, analyzing work along these two axes is a return on effort evaluation, where you’re trying to maximize impact against minimal effort. When you get good at navigating this framework, a lot of the filtering happens without any major effort. This might start by being a lot of work, but when you get used to this, you start getting better,

That, when you encounter something and quickly recognize its different factors, its effort and its impact, you can quickly determine if it should be deprioritized or not. So you can think of your vision, in fact, as one giant problem, which should get broken down into smaller problems, into work efforts, into projects that create forward motion towards your vision.

And doing so allows you to apply this framework to all of your work. Not just problems, but everything that you’re trying to get done. And that helps even when you encounter new challenges or you need to reanalyze your work towards achieving your vision.

And this gets down to applying the three enabling principles of the preceding episodes. First, shape the problem before jumping into a solution. Second, ideally shape it into lower effort Wins. Then third, make sure someone feels accountable for realizing the impact of that small win. This is essentially the perpetual state of an organization that is good at problem resolution. It’s not a process that’s executed by exception, but rather it should be the norm in approaching all work.

Getting good at this will help make your organization truly effective. So with that, I’d like you to think about are, you and your team focusing on the right problems? Are there tasks you’ve been putting too much effort into that won’t actually yield high impact results?

And how often are you stepping back to reassess and adjust your team’s priorities based on new insights and progress? And can you find time starting today to take the top three challenges you’re facing and apply this analysis to them? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it, and send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com and I’ll try to address a few towards the end of the season. Join me next time where I’ll talk about creating leaders.