Never prioritize!

I want to stir some thinking, so let me suggest that the activity known as "prioritizing" is a bad idea.

Now, Sun Tsu's ancient classic The Art of War recommends, if you find yourself on "bad ground", that you should get off it as soon as possible. Bad ground, would be, for example, having your army on a flood plain between two hills on top of which are two enemy armies -- in the monsoon season.

Bad ground for many entities today is finding oneself forced to decide between dying an immediate death (taking the bad impact all at once), or increasing the odds of dying every day from now on into the future (spreading the bad impact over the future.)

For example, on a national level, the Federal Reserve had a choice of keeping interest rates up, causing the stock market to crash and homeowners to go broke next month, or lowering rates, avoiding the instant death at the cost of a perpetual below-the-radar push on the Chinese and others to move their wealth out of the US and dollar-denominated assets. So, the Fed picked to lower rates a lot, and the dollar went in to accelerated falling and set new records against the Euro, the Canadian dollar, the Chinese Yuan, against gold and oil, etc. But, most voters either are out to lunch, or weigh getting through next month over leaking wealth out of their dollar-denominated retirement funds, so this got little first-page press.

And, that's because the voters themselves are on "bad ground", picking short-term survival against longer-term survival -- neither being a very good choice.

So, here's one of my own little rules of thumb:

If you're in a bad place, and every day it gets worse, you cannot achieve victory by waiting around for things to "get better."

Or, to parphrase an old Chinese proverb

"Man must wait long time on corner with mouth open for roast duck to fly in."

In the corporate world, one way things tend to go downhill relentlessly is when the problems have reached "system level" complexity, and the management team refuses to stop trying to solve them all by itself without help.

Unfortunately, in a culture of predators, admitting weakness is seen as an invitation to attract them all and become lunch, so the worse things get, the lower the odds management will admit publicly, or even to itself, that things are getting too complicated to handle.

So, one sign of that situation occurring is the familiar refrain "We need to prioritize." This usually signals that there are many more problems being raised than there is management bandwidth to solve.

Worse, many of those problems are system-level, and, being human and short-sighted, management then seeks to go for breathing room and the quick victory and the easy win, meaning it selects problems based on their ability to solve them quickly, not on the importance of the solution or the off-the-radar opportunity cost of going another week or month without a solution. (Surely, this is costing a lot somewhere, as the shutdown of the State of Michigan is demonstrating, as work has to stop and lay people off waiting for resolution.)

So, the system-level problems are selectively left for "later", which never comes, as they are root-cause problems and keep on generating new local events and symptoms which are viewed as if they are separate, independent new problems. It should come as no surprise that solving these "symptoms" doesn't cure the patient. In medicine, that would be termed "quackery."

But, management may argue in my virtual debate here, "We can't deal with everything at once!"

Well, hmm. Good point. The bummer is that life can, and does, hit you with everything at once. Deciding whether you want to keep on breathing, or keep your blood flowing is a lousy time to "Prioritize."

The key to the solution is the implicit hidden constraint in that phrase

"We can't deal with everything at once!"

Again, since the mountain will not come to you, you are going to have to go to the mountain. If the problems won't assist you by becoming smaller than your problem solving bandwidth, you are going to have only one choice -- increase your problem solving bandwidth.

And since the "you" (management team) is already working 16 hour days, that cannot mean put in more hours, or "work smarter" or "prioritize." Those only perpetuate the problem.

The root-cause problem is the arrogant implicit assumption that "only management is smart enough to solve these problems -- everyone else is an idiot. "

It is remarkable in a company with 100,000 employees, that 12 or fewer try to solve big problems, and are surprised they keep failing, despite prioritizing.

That is a very poor mental model. Maybe, some of those other human beings are more capable than management acts as if they are.

Maybe, collectively, those other human beings are way more capable than managment thinks they are.

The problem isn't that the employees are stupid - it's that management is unwilling to admit that the employees may be more than expenses.

If someone sees a flaw in this reasoning, please post a comment. It seems to me that, once the problems become system-level and larger than management's collective ability to solve, only one of three things can happen:

1. The whole thing crashes and burns, or
2. The external world lets up and gets a lot easier, or
3. Management finally yields some status and power to employees, even to, gasp, "labor."

If I were a majority stockholder in a company going downhill, in today's world, I wouldn't want option 1; Option 2 seems unlikely; and that leaves option 3.

Option 3 is what "Lean" and "Toyota Way" is about -- empowering workers, building stockholder wealth, at the expense of hegemony in status and power for the current management team the stockholders have in place to meet their needs.

Of course, this also means that if things are not going well for the company, the solution for the stockholders is not to replace the management team with a different small group of different people, which will only have the same problem, but will stir up enough dust and reorganization to delay dealing with it for longer. The ONLY solution is that the whole managment-hegemony model has to be discarded, and management retasked with bringing more of the company employees into the decision-making loop, working in parallel.

That also means that management probably is not worth $250, 000,000 apiece any more, although they can easily be worth $25,000,000 apiece if they accomplish spreading out the work of "managing" the company over the workforce and emerging sufficient collective brainpower and reality to accomplish that task.

The solution direction, in other words, is not "more Rambo" and "even more super supermen." The solution direction for the stockholders is "less Rambo, more distributed participatory problem-solving." It will only be more and more true as time goes on, the world shrinks, and everything becomes perversely connected to everything else. It will not become "simpler", ever again. Ever. No Johnny, not even in 100 years. Not in 1000 years. Not in a billion years, with computer assistance. (Not that the "quants" have shown themselves able to make a buck successfully in Hedge funds these days in the first place.)

We are being forced, inexorably, to figure out how to actually accomplish work "together."
Rats. Most managers had hoped it wouldn't come to that. When I had suggested in B-school that managers might "cooperate", the room of MBA's burst into laughter, assuming I was making a great joke. That event identifies the mental concept that is dragging us down -- that the job of corporate executives is to fight with each other to see who is "top" or who is "best." Obviously, if that is their task, giving another 500 people keys to the executive suite would make no sense at all.
The question is:

Is that their task? Or is the task of management to increase stockholder wealth by doing whatever it takes, even, gasp, distributing knowledge and voting-rights and power?

Counter-arguments, anyone? I'm open here. The comment field can be anonymous. Please post agreement or disagreement if you have a minute.