I have been reflecting on some of the work I have done over the years on leadership and management especially in relation to strategy and prioritisation.
My background is economics, and simply put, the basic economic problem is scarcity. Wants and needs are essentially unlimited, but available resources are not. Economics is the science of allocation of these finite resources in the face of unlimited wants.
When it comes to an organisational allocation of resources, you can’t do everything you want to do, you have to prioritise what you do.
Of course though everything you want to do is important.
The reality is some things are more important than other things.
As an organisation you need to prioritise what you want to do based on what you consider what is important and what is not necessarily unimportant, but more less important.
You could let the staff (or teams) decide what is important,, but there are issues with this. They may choose what they think is important, this may not be what the organisation or the customers think is important. They may in fact decide what they are going to do based on what they want to do, rather than what is important. There is also the issue of duplication of effort, as different teams choose to do the same thing, as they both consider it important.
It isn’t just an issue of deciding what is important, but also deciding what should be prioritised and what shouldn’t. That prioritisation exercise needs to take into account all the factors that will influence that decision making, such as availability and cost of resources.
Deciding what is important is a strategic decision, strategy should drive decision making about what is important and what isn’t.
Everything is important, but some things are more important than others.