Harry: The priorities do not tell us what to do. They help guide our attention and they give us a sense of direction about where we should be paying attention in order to make better decisions and to work with other people in a more productive way.

Narrator: You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. 

Jorge: Harry, how are you doing?

Harry: Ah, I'm doing excellent, Jorge. It is just a pleasure to see you once again.

Jorge: It's always such a treat. Is there anything turning you on in your world? 

Harry: You know, what's lighting me up right now is that I have a set of people, a small set of people in my life, that I am starting to collaborate with in a way that is so enlivening. And I have to include you in that list, man. It is so much fun to be doing this and pushing at the edges of creating something of value, of utility, of meaning for other people, and getting to do it with somebody I appreciate and enjoy and respect. So thank you.

Jorge: It's completely mutual. And I was gonna say, I do think that – well, I hope that – these conversations are of value to people, but I'll tell you that they are of value to me for sure. 

Harry: I brought something to read today to share with you. I am gonna admit right up front that I took some liberties, which is, I found something I wanted to read, but I realized that it was over about thirty pages and I figured the only way to do it was to carve the specific sentences out and put it together in a very short reading. So it's not a purist read, but I didn't take any liberties with it either.

Jorge: It's the abridged version.

Harry: It's the abridged version or little excerpts.

Jorge: All right.

Harry: Okay. You ready? Alright, here it goes. 

"If freedom is choosing, priorities can't be predetermined. A compass will point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about what you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles and achieve nothing, then what's the use of knowing True North? An infinite number of possibilities exist in an indeterminate number of levels, all simultaneously. Some are predictable, most aren't. 

Jorge: "We generally know where we're going, butwe're constantly adjusting our route to avoid the unexpected, including obstructions others place in our path while on their way to wherever they're going. There's nothing unusual about this simultaneous presence within our minds of short-term sensitivity to surroundings and a long-term sense of direction. We live with these opposites every day. No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities though, is better than having no sense of what to expect. I like this a lot. It's triggered many thoughts in my mind. and I thought I knew what book you were reading from, but then I had second thoughts and say, no, it can't be that one. 

Harry: Well, you recommended this book to me, 

Jorge: I think it's On Grand Strategy,

Harry: It is. It's John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy. That's exactly what it is. The excerpts would've made it a little bit harder for you to pinpoint. 

Jorge: The tip off for me was the references to the compass, because there's a section where, as I recall, he references the movie about Abraham Lincoln, the Steven Spielberg movie about Abraham Lincoln, and a fictional speech that Lincoln gives there, but it just happens to be well-written and about the use of a compass. Anyway, I am very excited that you've brought this text to share. What prompted you to bring this?

Harry: There were a number of things. One of them is that having recently released the book Managing Priorities, I'm in a lot of conversations with people about prioritization, about the process of prioritizing and about the challenges of conflicting imperatives and conflicting priorities. And of course, one of the arguments, perhaps the most extreme argument is, if everything's gonna change, why prioritize at all? Right? And if, like Gaddis says, if freedom is choosing, priorities can't be predetermined. 

But in fact, it is the process of prioritizing, and let's just start with a team working with and collaborating with team members, that it is more about the process of identifying what matters more and why or what matters less and why, than it is about the actual priorities themselves. Because the priorities inform the plans, the priorities inform the decisions. They inform the action. The priorities – and this hearkens back to I think it was our last conversation around decisions and action – the priorities do not tell us what to do. They help guide our attention and they give us a sense of direction about where we should be paying attention in order to make better decisions and to work with other people in a more productive way.

And so, part of what has really got my attention right now with this reading and with the topic of prioritization as it relates to – I just gave a talk on this at a large company in San Francisco – is the process itself of prioritizing is so similar in some ways to strategy in that when you, regardless of where you are, if you look up, it looks strategic, and when you look down, it looks tactical. And this is something I learned from Nilofer Merchant when I was working with her at Rubicon. And she was writing her book, which I had the great fortune of doing a lot of the ghost authoring for her book, The New How, which was on collaborative strategy development, published by O'Reilly. And so it's this connection between strategy, prioritization, execution, collaboration, and recognizing that it is our good judgment that is the keystone to all of this. I worked with a brilliant woman named Joni Ohta – I don't believe she's with us any longer, sad to say – at Hewlett Packard, many, years ago. An internal consulting group at HP called the Software Initiative. And she used to say, "Testing doesn't give you quality. The result of testing is information. It's what you do with that information that gets you quality." And prioritization's the same way. Your priorities don't give you good decisions and they don't give you good outcomes. They direct your attention in a way that allows you to use your good judgment to chart a course to better results in the hope and in the intent of getting better outcomes. So this piece, to me, better than anything that I've seen, really spoke to both sides of that equation. 

Jorge: What's coming to mind here is that most of the time, when I think about priorities, I do it in the context of very granular actions like, what do I have to do today? I do this at the beginning of every day. I sit down with my to-do list and my calendar, and I do the Franklin Covey thing. You go through your list of things that you need to do and you figure out which ones are more important, which ones you're gonna have time for given, your schedule. I think that many people think of priorities at that level of granularity.

But what you're suggesting here – and this comes across very clearly in your book – is that prioritization has to happen at multiple levels in that the things that make it into your bucket of things to do for the day had better be in service to another list of things that they can roll up into. Because you can't do everything. You said that there's a relationship between prioritizing and strategy. I think there absolutely is, right? I'm gonna paraphrase, but there's that old Steve Jobs quote about like, focus is about saying "no." That's talking about strategy: you choose to do things a certain way and not another way, so you're opting for one thing over another and that's, prioritization, right? 

I'm also thinking of Roger Martin's Cascading Choices framework for strategy. That's all about making certain decisions about where you are going to focus your time and energy. I'm gonna bring it back to the Gaddis thing, this image of navigating with a compass. You want to have decided that you are heading north. That's one level of prioritizing. It's, "I need to get to, I don't know, Toronto or whatever. So I'm gonna head northwards." And that's a decision you've made. You might have made it with other people, which I think is a big part of what your book is about. 

But then, knowing that you're heading north, you are faced with the question, "where do I have to walk to immediately next?" Like, where does my next step need to be? It might be that if I head directly north, I might have a wall in the way. So I might have to shift direction. And we do this – we iterate on this – over and over again. 

And part of what I got from the Gaddis book is that you need to be clear on your priorities at both levels. Like the super high level, like what is my strategy? What am I trying to achieve here? Who are my competitors? What market am I looking to play in? You know, the marketing questions. But you also need to be prioritizing at a more tactical level because conditions on the ground change and you're getting... you talked about testing and getting information, right? You're getting different information when you're actually implementing, when you're doing things, and you find that there's a wall in the way or there's another product that just launched that has a feature that trumps what you are doing, So you have to be skillful at prioritizing at both levels, at the very high level, the "what are we doing here?," the 30,000 feet view, and also at the moment where you're executing.

Harry: Of course, I'm a little sheepish about turning this into a whole discussion about prioritization. That was not my intent, believe it or not. And yet, everything I look at now is colored by my new understanding of priorities, prioritizing, and prioritization. And you can prioritize your values, and understanding what your values are and at what level your priorities and values sit can tell you something like, "Yeah, Toronto is where I want to go. And that's because Canada is good." Right? 

That's a value, and your values drive your convictions. And your convictions then inform your priorities. And the more you're aware of this stuff and how dynamic it all is, and the more you're aware that you can only see through the keyhole of your experience, that back to the Gaddis quote, no one can anticipate everything that might happen. But sensing possibilities though is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. It gives us a lot more clarity, having done the work, to get a sense of what the landscape is so that it's not all foreign. And that's what allows us to lean forward and put a foot out with the, trust and the faith that gravity will pull us forward and put that foot on the ground so that we can do it again. And if you put one foot in front of the other and you keep stepping, then you're back to traction, right? You're starting to see movement and you can head in a direction. You can always change, right? But if you don't do that, if you stand there frozen, there's no movement at all.

Jorge: I guess the point that I was trying to make in talking about the two different levels is that that space of possibilities that you're referring to only becomes visible when you're actually in the field. I'm reminded of these early RPG video games where you're crawling through a dungeon, let's say, and you have a map of the thing, but the map is blacked out and it only gets revealed to you as you crawl through the dungeon. And the more you transverse the terrain, the more of the map you get because you can't know about the places where you haven't been.

And this actually circles back to our previous conversation about mental models. There comes a point where the things that you are deciding on, you have to work with abstractions because you don't have experience. You know, you haven't crawled through that part of the dungeon you have to hypothesize what you might find there. That's why to me, one of the valuable insights from that On Grand Strategy book is the interplay between having your feet on the ground and your senses attuned to what is going on, but also having this kind of more abstract vision of where it is that you want to get to so that you can make the right choices when the moment comes to act.

Yeah, that's a hundred percent right. And I'm so glad you brought us back there, because that's the thing that I was hoping to tease out. Because we talked you, I don't remember if it was, I think it was a couple of calls ago, we talked about this notion of focusing on the (inaudible). What can we do? What's our practice? And in some sense, our practice has to be putting ourself out there, because you can only do so much in the hallucination of your own mind. At some point you have to engage. And yet, you can't suspend all disbelief and engage and do so without any sense of what you're trying to accomplish or where you're trying to go or what's important to you. And so, it's very much about that, interplay between where you are and what you want and need. There's a famous speech by Theodore Roosevelt. I'm sure you've seen this, The Man in the Arena. This is from the early part of the 20th century, so can't help the gendered language, unfortunately. But I think he's talking about everybody, right? I forget exactly how it goes, and it's a pretty long speech, but the gist of it is that that you have to act. Like, you can't just think about it, right? The day belongs to the person who gets in the arena and actually hashes it out. And that requires rolling up sleeves, getting to work, publishing the thing, seeing how the world reacts. And if you make a mistake, you correct course, and you go from there, right? Butyou've hopefully done the exercise of thinking at the higher level, what this is in service to. Where am I heading? What's north? Are we going north? Is this thing that we're doing going to get us there? 

I don't have any problems with taking it to prioritization because it's such an important skill. The gist of it is, we don't have unlimited time. We don't have unlimited energy or resources. And you have to focus what you do have to get the results that you want to get. It's not gonna happen by accident. Throwing stuff against the wall ain't gonna get it.

Harry: That's right. And it's part of I think, why I have such a strong affinity to Oliver Burkeman's work. He wrote a book called Four Thousand Weeks. He blurbed my book, I'm quite grateful to say, at the behest of our publisher, Lou Rosenfeld. And it's far more than we have time to talk about right now, but it is about... It's like, our understanding is a relationship between the enactment and the thinking. And it's this constant reveal or unfurling of possibilities in front of us that allows us to guide our action based on this very sensitive little compass we have called our preference – our little preference engine – that's our compass and that tells us more of this or less of that, right? It says yes or it says no. And a lot of the work I do with my clients is about sensitizing them to their preferences because ultimately that tool, that internal guidance system is often a very quiet voice that's tell, that tells you which direction to, to lean into.

Jorge: I'm thinking back to our conversation about data-driven decision making. And what's coming to mind in hearing you talk about this is that so many business environments are very data-driven to the point where you might tune out that voice. You might stop relying on it and maybe lose the channel.Yeah. Or talk it out. You know, we can argue with it and we'll win, 'cause we're louder. 

Well, I'm getting the sense that this is valuable at the personal level, obviously. I know that it's also valuable at the group level. And we're not gonna have time to go there now, but I would love to have a conversation about this topic in the context of a group; what are the dynamics that come to play in helping clarify the vision, the priorities at the higher level, as a group. Is there anything that we can think about, before we have that conversation, that points in that direction? 

Harry: I immediately think of Luke Hohmann's work. I think about innovation games and I think about things as simple as "buy a feature" as an innovation game, right? Using a marketplace simulation as a way of getting people to place bets effectively on what it is they think is important. I guess it's not even a bet, it's a down payment on what they think is important. And to do it in a simulated environment in order to figure out when you have limited resources, what are you willing to put your money on

Jorge: Yeah. Talk is cheap, right? Get some skin in the game here.

Harry: Exactly. This is a long conversation that we should wrap up now, but I think I can see a number of places we can go with this and I'm looking forward to the next conversation.

Jorge: Awesome. As always, I had a wonderful time talking with you, and learned a lot. Thank you, Harry.

Harry: All right. Thank you, Jorge. 

Narrator: Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes@tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.