Prioritizing is not the same as focusing
Why is focusing so hard?
This post is also available in Portuguese.
I've talked to hundreds of companies about why they're turning to OKR. Lack of focus is always high on the list.
Employees feel pulled in multiple directions by a never-ending list of goals, projects, and KPIs. Everything is a priority, so nothing is.
Why is focusing so hard?
Focusing and being outcome-driven have a lot in common. There are structural, deeper causes that make both incredibly challenging.
Just like being outcome-driven, real focus is never easy. And it becomes even harder due to weak muscles and misguided mindsets.
You can't focus without the right skills or organizational capabilities, the same way you can't be outcome-driven without them.
And focusing is almost impossible if your beliefs or processes make you set multiple priorities. It's similar to how the know-it-all mindset and practices like project-based funding make people focus on meeting due dates instead of achieving outcomes.
To truly focus, we have to develop new muscles and mindsets. Just like we need to do to become outcome-driven.
We have to build the muscles to identify the handful of goals that will create real impact and to say no to the multiple great ideas that may be useful, but are not critical.
We also have to unlearn old mindsets and abandon any practice that pulls us into distractions and the diffusion of our efforts.
We'll begin by discussing those misguided mindsets, right after a quick commercial break.
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Now, let's explore some of the mindsets that can hinder our ability to focus.
Prioritizing is not the same as focusing
Many people believe that all they need to do to focus is to “prioritize,” which usually means creating a laundry list of dozens of “priorities.”
But when every team takes this approach, the organization quickly ends up with hundreds of competing efforts, spreading investments across multiple areas.
In the early 2000s, tech executive Brad Garlinghouse warned about a similar situation inside Yahoo in his famous "Peanut Butter Manifesto":
We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone. (...)
I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
I hate peanut butter. We all should.
The fact that many readers have to Google "Yahoo" to know what it is shows the consequences of spreading a company too thin.
Focusing is something completely different. Focusing means concentrating energy and resources on a small number of decisive things that will generate the majority of the results.
A strategy is not a list of priorities
Another belief that makes focusing harder is that formulating strategy is just making a list of goals or priorities.
But as Roger Martin explains, strategy involves making choices that fit together and reinforce each other:
[Strategy] is not a list of stuff that makes a company better. It is an integrated set of choices that in combination creates a way of winning — where the company has chosen to play.
Spreading resources across a list of disjointed goals isn’t a strategy, even if each of the goals is worthwhile.
We often dream of having one or two unifying goals that everyone in the company can rally around. But the reality is that organizations usually have conflicting aspirations that can't all be achieved at the same time.
As Richard Rumelt points out:
Most people and organizations have “a bundle of ambitions.” That is, they have multiple intentions, visions of the future, and things they would like to see or achieve. Some things in this “bundle” conflict with one another—not all can be achieved together.
I once worked with a company that set two seemingly reasonable goals: moving to the product model and making significant cost reductions in its corporate functions.
But these goals ended up undermining each other. The CTO was trying to hire hundreds of engineers to support the product transformation, while HR was attempting to drastically reduce investments in recruiting to hit the cost reduction targets.
A real strategy has to provide clear guidance on how to make these inevitable tradeoffs.
For example, a clear strategy might involve reducing recruiting costs for other roles while maintaining or even increasing the investment per hire for engineers. That's the difference between focusing on what's truly important and just setting priorities.
The one-size-fits-all approach to cost reduction—saying everyone has to cut costs by 20%—is a telltale sign of lack of strategy. It's peanut butter cost-cutting, spreading cuts evenly across the organization.
Focus is not “fair”
Another common misconception is believing organizations have to divide team capacity "fairly" among different stakeholders. They end up spreading a thin layer of investment across multiple priorities without focusing on anything in particular.
In EMPOWERED, Marty Cagan shared a vivid example of a company that was prioritizing without focusing:
A few years ago, one of the execs of the music service Pandora shared the “Pandora Prioritization Process”—the company’s process for deciding what to work on and build.
The process involved letting stakeholders “buy” the features they wanted from the feature teams until their budget ran out.
(...) I immediately recognized the complete and utter absence of product strategy and especially focus. Not bad product strategy—literally no product strategy.
After years of declining listeners and struggling to turn a profit, Pandora was eventually sold off for little more than half of its IPO price.
Focus and strategy aren’t fair. While you need to balance the needs of different stakeholders, they are not all equally important. You have to show empathy and candor, without avoiding the necessary trade-offs.
To focus, we have to unlearn
To truly focus, we have to abandon mindsets and practices that make us spread our resources like peanut butter on a slice of bread.
We need to abandon the belief that making long lists of “priorities” is the same as focusing. We have to let go of the notion of being “fair,” and distributing our investments across different stakeholders. And we have to unlearn the idea that a strategy is simply a collection of goals.
Coming next: the muscles and mindsets of focus
Next week I'll be back with part 2 of this article, covering the muscles and mindsets of focus.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or email me.
Links:
Brad Garlinghouse: The Peanut Butter Manifesto.
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