The magic prioritization trick

https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-245-the-magic-prioritization

First, I ask the team to organize their initiatives based purely on urgency—one axis, not two. I describe the many scenarios where urgent things aren’t necessarily valuable, and valuable things aren’t necessarily urgent. I stress that questions of urgency—when to enter a market, when to care about competitors, near-term risk vs. long-term risk—are inherently strategic.

Once I’m comfortable with the distribution (or I’ve used up all of my tricks), we proceed to value. I shift everything down to the BOTTOM of a 2x2. We start with the premise that nothing is valuable. This is where things get interesting. The only move they have at their disposal is the VERTICAL movement. They can’t shift urgency. To help a team, I label the Y axis with something like Game Change, Optimizer, and Tweak.

I turn whatever they have into a 9-box and divide each cell into three columns: 1-3mo, 1-3q, and 1-3y. Then, I instruct the team to place the initiatives in one of the three columns FOR THE CURRENT CELL. No moving around to different cells.

Notice what’s happening? Something can be Soon + Game Changer + 1-3y, and that is equivalent to ASAP + Optimizer + 1-3Y. Both should be sequenced after anything in green (Highest CD3).

So what happened behind the scenes? In the first two exercises, we discovered the opportunity cost (or cost of delay) of the opportunity. The urgency and value decoupling is a mind game, but it works. In the final step, we layered in duration to arrive at a weight cost of delay (CoD/duration), which is a useful tool for sequencing.