People are so busy today, that they tend to only pay attention to the things at the top of their to-do list – the urgent things.

The problem with that is that there is no progress on any of the non-urgent things; and collectively, those things add up. In fact, the future of your work depends on them.

There is an analogy to a situation in computer science that is called process starvation: it is when high-priority processes are given all of the compute time, leaving none for the lower priority processes. The result is that some processes sit there forever, never making any progress. Operating system designers learned long ago that even the lowest priority processes need to receive some compute cycles on an ongoing basis – otherwise the system will become flooded with more and more effectively dead processes.

Those dead processes? Those are your ever-growing to-do list, specifically, the items that are not flagged as urgent.

What Can I Do?

It seems simple to say, “Just do some of the other things too”, but that is kind of like saying, “If you want to lose weight, just eat less.”

That might work for some people, but the problem is that dealing with the ever-growing to-do list, just like losing weight, requires dealing with deeply rooted behaviors, many of which are reactive, unconscious, emotion-based, and part of our automatic response system – our “System 1” mind.

Identify the Assumptions that Your Current Strategies are Based On

Do you have a clear view of what assumptions your current strategies are based on? If not, try listing them.

For example, if one of your strategies is to add AI-related features to your product, some of your assumptions might be,

• Current AI technology is stable.
• AI is mainly about large language models (LLMs).
• Customers want AI features.
• Customers trust AI.
• AI can perform features well.
• There are not other technologies that might emerge as more important than AI, or might already be more important.

and so on.

If you are clear about your assumptions, then you can always be alert for new information that challenges assumptions. Also, realize that you won’t be able to list all of your assumptions: some will be so deep that you won’t think of them, but if you are always questioning your strategies every time you hear about new developments, you can train yourself to identify assumptions that you are making.

Identify Indicators About Those Assumptions

If you know what your assumptions are, you can actively watch for change in those areas. For example, the graph below shows progress in AI capabilities over time. If one had been watching AI capabilities, one would be alert for capabilities passing the thresholds in the red box, because those precede AI reaching human-level capability in those areas. For such things, it is good to have early warning.

Shift to Event-Based Planning, Over Cadence-Based Planning

As soon as you realize that one of your assumptions behind a strategy is no longer true, or is on the verge of becoming invalid, it is time to replan.

You don’t scrap all your plans and start from scratch; rather, you examine each strategy whose assumptions have become invalid, and rethink those.

This is how you can get everyone to be immersed in the strategies, which should be top-of-mind at all times. By being event-based like this, and clear about assumptions and the strategies based on those assumptions, and always watching for change, people become attuned to the assumptions and the strategies.

That makes them more thoughtful and purpose-driven. It makes them more intentional. It makes them more focused on the goal that the strategies are designed to support.

Always Have Both Short-Term and Long-Term Plans

As I explained, one of the mistakes that managers make is they focus mostly on urgent issues. That’s “fire fighting”. Urgent issues are important, but long term issues are too. Ignoring either will lead to failure.

In our course on Goals, Strategies, and Measurement, we teach people to always plan for both the short term and the long term. When one is deciding how to solve a problem, short term remedies are triage – to “stop the bleeding”. Long term remedies fix the root cause.

From our course on Goals, Strategies, and Measurement.

One must have discipline about this: when planning or deciding on action, always separate short term and long term, and make a plan or decision for each.

Always Measure Progress on Both Short-Term and Long-Term Plans

When deciding on metrics to use, always choose a metric for short term progress, and one for long term root cause progress. Make both equally visible.

People focus on what gets measured. If you don’t measure whether the root cause is being fixed, it will never be fixed.

When Planning, Include All the Components – Including the Behavior and Knowledge Components

Another mistake that managers often make is they focus on very tangible actions, but ignore the less tangible things like people’s skills and behaviors. Yet skills and behaviors represent huge components of people’s capabilities.

The figure below is our model for organizational outcomes. It flows from left to right. An organization’s culture manifests through people’s behavior – the behavioral norms, which are generated by leaders’ expectations as well as their experience and training. People also need cognitive tools – patterns – for how to solve problems. These are things like work breakdown structure and Agile backlog – two very different tools for a similar kind of problem. People are constrained by the set of tools that they know.

Thus, in any long term plan, it is essential to include knowledge and behavior. Do people have the knowledge that they will need? Do they have the behaviors – particularly the leadership and engagement – that is needed to get things moving effectively and cross the finish line?

We believe in identifying all of the tangible and intangible factors that are needed to make a strategy successful. We believe in starting with those before making concrete plans. That approach is explained here.

Conclusion

Today’s chaotic environment requires discipline, to ensure that one is not reactive. It is essential that we give equal time to both short-term and long-term considerations, so that we do not “paint ourselves into a corner” and address root causes, as well as prepare for the future and pay attention to factors that might require changes in strategy.

We need to be intentional about everything, not reactive.

Next Article: Imagine If All Your People Were Highly Engaged