Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize! Stop! Prioritize Systems, Not Projects.

In organizations today, there's a constant, misguided cry to prioritize. Middle management often claims, "When we focused on just one or two projects, we delivered." While this may (or may not) be true, the rationale for prioritization is fundamentally flawed. The causal explanation embedded in this argument is that prioritization leads to delivery and, therefore, to success. Executives are not naive; they understand that focusing on just a couple of projects will not sustain the organization in the long run. If competitors are delivering newer and more innovative features at a much faster rate, and we are failing even to copy and deliver those features to our existing paying customers who demand them, prioritizing a few projects—even if they get delivered—will lead to the company's demise.

Real Challenge

The real challenge lies in systemic inefficiencies—the "corporate traffic jam." Executives are torn between delivering a few projects successfully and risking the company's future, or attempting multiple projects and potentially failing. They struggle to understand why, despite having abundant resources, they can only deliver a few projects. The reason is simple: they feel the outcome of systemic congestion but cannot see the underlying structure that truly causes it. Analogy never develops knowledge of systems, and because we are using analogy, it's important that we highlight the key differences between the two analogous systems before you start using that knowledge to drive change in your work management systems.

Difference between Traffic vs Work Congestion

We will list two of many key differences between traffic jams in transportation systems and corporate work management systems. In transportation, success is when individual cars reach their destination, so the throughput and cycle time of cars that move independently are the focus. In corporations, success isn't about individual project pieces (cars) getting delivered, but rather all pieces being delivered as a cohort. Think of the requirement that certain cars, starting from different locations on the highway, must take a given exit together as a cohort. Now imagine that every car is part of some cohort and they must stay together before taking an exit. What a fiasco it would be! Now assume that some cars have to take multiple exits with multiple cohorts. Whoa! The fiasco is way worse. This is the problem of corporate work traffic systems, and it's even worse than that. In traffic systems, each car knows where it's going; in the complex world of modern product and software development systems, new information emerges during the process, which may require us to even change the planned exit.

Traffic Jam: A Poor Analogy for Work Congestion

So this analogy of vehicle transportation systems for work management in corporations is terrible because it oversimplifies the complexity of work management—a complexity that is massive. On top of it, work management queues are all invisible, so we underestimate the problem we face. Executives receive reports about traffic jams but can't actually see them. Many executives don't even get a "traffic report," which program managers are supposed to collect from the ground. All they see are certain cohorts of cars (projects) labeled Red, Yellow, and Green in terms of PowerPoint decks or dashboards. Just because you know that projects are shifting from green to yellow to red doesn't mean you have an explanation for why projects are failing. Data never produces an explanation. I repeat: data never produces explanations. Thinking produces explanations, and unless we have a solid understanding of why things are happening the way they are, there's little chance of fixing it.

Fixable Problems with a Different Thinking Paradigm

It's important to note that these are not unfixable problems, but fixing them requires Systems Thinking and expertise in subjects like queuing theory, cadence, synchronization, batching, centralization vs. decentralization, human behavior, economics, and complex adaptive systems.

Corporations forget that in modern business dynamics, developing systemic capabilities is the primary core competency; without it, there's no way to exploit the business opportunities presented to us. But instead of acquiring knowledge of Systems, a now well-developed field, most people wrongly believe they are already Systems Thinkers and apply common-sense explanations. As Jay Forrester, the founder of Systems Dynamics, not so famously said, "The enemy of complex systems is common sense." When common sense fails, all leaders can do is blame people for not doing their jobs right.