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March 24, 2004
Working a decision-support checklist
I just spent two days doing our workflow coaching process with the CEO of a company that owns and runs several for-profit colleges. Several hours of those two days were simply holding a focus for him to make decisions about stuff in his piles that had accumulated around him. I have seen the decision logjam often, especially with particularly sophisticated people in fast-growth situations, wearing a lot of hats and keeping many plates concomitantly spinning in the air.
As we were processing the fifteen foot-high piles we had spent a couple of hours collecting, this fellow kept coming across things he had looked at many times before, but because of the complexity of the issue and his lack of experience with it, he was hung up in his mind deciding what to do. He expressed his frustration with not knowing what to do about it and when I asked, "How could you find out?" he would say, "I have no idea." Basically at an impasse. As it became evident that this was fairly common occurrence in his stacks, he said "David, I need some help in terms of what to ask myself about these things so I can get past the log jam." (Obviously "What's the next action?" wasn't sufficient).
So we created a little checklist that he wrote and kept right on his desk as we were processing. Question No. 1: What IS this? He found that answering that out loud helped a bunch, and he would go into some detail. "This is a memo from a staff person about a certain situation that was not handled appropriately etc. etc." Then the next question that he wrote on the checklist was, (2) What is the purpose of this? In other words, why is this on my desk? He would then talk that out loud. "This is here because they sent it to me because of this, that, or the other." At that point it became a lot easier to address the third question, which is, of course, so (3) What's the next action about this?
I was surprised how many times he actually pulled out the checklist and used it to unstick something. (He added to the checklist as the first thing: Stop! Take some time. Take a breath!) Over several hours I watched him train himself in this thinking process.This guy is no dummy, being the owner and chairman of a very successful organization This guy is one of the brightest around, but it was often his inability to know how exactly and perfectly to deal with some issue with which he was not familiar that had him hung up. It was particularly acute in his case because he has to be handling areas of responsibility that he was unfamiliar with. His organization and enterprise has doubled in size in the last two years and there were several senior management positions on his executive team that he has not been able to fill with people yet, so he was chief marketing officer as well as controller as well as all the jobs and functions of being the Chairman and CEO, with lots of new growth opportunities in front of him. I got to experience again for myself how the simple thinking process of GTD has profound implications in the real world for some of the already most productive people around...
Posted by David at March 24, 2004 05:01 AM
Comments
David:
While I find your postings pure, informative and full of quality content, the text is very hard to read. There don't seem to be any natural paragraph breaks and your RSS feed doesn't contain the entire post. This makes it hard to assess if a direct visit to your site.
Could you take a look at it and see if there's a way for it to be a little more readable?
Congrats on the jump to blogging....
Regards,
Steve Kirks
Posted by: Steve Kirks at March 25, 2004 06:34 AM
Fascinating discussion. I also work in a university setting and often find myself in "logjams" similar to the executive you describe. For me, however, it's writing that needs to get written, not piles of paper that need to be reduced. I'm very good at clearing my desk of piles, but terrible at clearing my inbox of writing assignments. The three question list seems like it will be useful to deal with this as I write. I have just created a StickyNote on my computer desktop to keep at hand as I work on an my next article.
Posted by: Jeffrey Feldman at March 25, 2004 06:56 AM
David - thanks for the postings. I find these few paragraphs at a time a very accessable way to get some good ideas in a short attention span in a busy day.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti at March 26, 2004 11:44 AM
In a conversation yesterday discussing the nature of what I do for Wells Fargo, we talked about the fact that being a relationship builder is often a job that is hard to measure but it became clear when I said "A well built and maintained relationship is a fine deliverable." So by calling it a deliverable we agreed it was now something we could all take pride in delivering to the rest of the organization as a way of building shareholder value.
Posted by: Richard M. Konecki at April 2, 2004 09:16 AM
Richard, great observation and implementation of "knowledge work athletics." Peter Drucker told all of us our hardest work is defining our work.
Posted by: David Allen at April 7, 2004 10:11 AM
Hi David,
i'm alittle disappointed that i couldn't find or buy your book at the store, but perhaps i should have used the name David Allen vs Robert Allen :)) sorry, you can charge me extra for the book for such a mistake he he
I also found that you self publish only ? or can we find the book at the book store, i'll probablly end up buying it from the site if that's the only place to get it.
looking forward to reading it. I'm a coach a.k.a (martial artist) too
best regards,
Posted by: warmac at April 28, 2005 11:31 PM