The art of prioritization

In the art of prioritization we tend to either end up with a lot of conflict and tension or functional amount of alignment and momentum. This is true whether were talking about prioritization of actions or projects.

When it's a situation of conflict and tension what typically happens is that people prioritize according to the criteria of importance. This is the problem of asking people whose ideas are most important and it runs the risk of having everyone say each one's is the most important and so we have no functional prioritization just conflict and tension.

More functional way to approach this is by having people prioritize by sequencing rather than by importance. In sequencing we put things in the order in which they most logically need to occur. So for cooking a meal together and the main dish takes two hours to prepare and the salad takes 10 minutes to prepare we need to really start the main dish first because we don't have to start the salad until an hour and 50 minutes into the main dish. There's no value in delaying the whole meal by starting a salad first. The first main dish and then salad even though they're both vitally important to the meal. Importance is irrelevant to sequencing because sequencing has to do with the logic and timing of tasks in their interdependencies. Even though both the cake and its ultimate decorations are important we might consider decorations happening after we take the cake out of the oven rather than before we put the cake in the this is the art of sequencing the art of prioritization.

So we can save an amazing amount of time and planning if only go to do prioritization we do it from a position of sequencing rather than importance. Once people get this distinction it makes everything easier.