Set priorities

Hiring highly educated and motivated people is smart, though it comes with more than one price. Intelligent people come up easily with solutions, think beyond symptoms and quick fixes, work out worst- and best-case scenarios and explore different abstraction levels, seeding new and nurturing existing ideas, making them grow in number and size. With effort invested, expectations set, and commitments made, momentum is built to avoid losing the opportunity, unless getting trapped in analysis paralysis. However, not all ideas are created equal.

All these brilliant ideas -at least from the author's perspective- demand attention and claim to be worth implementing, and (too) many will be. When nothing is prioritized or everything is top priority, which is synonymous to nothing is prioritized, chaos is inevitable. Relative cost-benefit comparison enables the dialogue to understand the value or opportunity of an idea, the waste and/or risk that it reduces, and the urgency and cost to implement and maintain. With these parameters, only one idea is on top, followed by a few runner-up candidates to further analyze or already implement its must-do’s.

Priorities give focus and direction, making organizations transparent and disciplined. It simplifies communication as everybody knows what is important and urgent and why, while encouraging negotiations based on facts and hypotheses, setting clear success criteria and investigating conditions, constraints and consequences that inform and influence the decision-making process throughout the development lifecycle. Furthermore, it aligns the finite capacity available to the organization with its vision and mission, which should not be a promise, but commitment.