Setting priorities: my experience facilitating leaders to do this.

It’s that whole thing about the journey.

You know how people sometimes go into a profession because they needed the help those professionals provide and then got hooked on experience and decided to give back? This post might be a little bit about that.

Mostly, I want to share a recent experience designing a two day facilitation for a group of leaders who identified “setting priorities” as, well, a priority.

Often we work with organizations struggling with this. What if we could offer something that would put leadership teams in a better situation for enabling modernization and digital service delivery?

I delivered the workshop and a half-baked mural board of workshop photos, digital handouts and a to-be-calculated table of prioritization results just before I signed-off for a week-long recovery break.

Just in time MVP FTW? We’ll see.

Irony(?): I delivered prioritization training that is not a priority (for me)

Somehow, my potential client decided that this leadership team workshop about prioritization was a priority. We couldn’t disagree with that… but we also couldn’t functionally agree that they would be a priority in our backlog. We didn’t know if we could say no, or if we did, what the clear reason would be.

Just prior to designing the workshop, my leadership team engaged Scrum Inc. to learn about a scaled Agile framework to help us resolve this kind of problem (and other growth-related challenges). It requires Leadership to be highly attuned to vision oriented values and logical value streams to focus teams around. This tuning is for the purpose of prioritizing the broader organization’s backlog. We do it to maximize value delivery.

We’re not done the first iteration of this process yet in my org. However, we’re more attuned to our collective values and what matters for delivery on value chains we’d been neglecting to shape with intention. Our behaviours and decisions have shifted already, even without a finalized matrix or process to order our backlog with.

I find this ironic, because I probably would have said no to delivering this workshop given how we’re seeing our incoming work and priorities now. At the same time, it helped me solidify my own learning, and to validate the power of the process.

I’ll share a little about this, because the just-in-time training enabled me to adapt my workshop plan.

The Prioritization Workshop I Delivered

For opening context about my client:

• They have a period of breathing room. Premier and Cabinet are focused in some other directions right now.
• There are some new team members in the leadership group of 15 people, and the Senior Leader is new as well.
• They have a typical shaped regulator organization structure: policy, permitting operations, compliance, communications, and corporate service. There are hand-offs between each of these teams and they need to constantly negotiate what is important to pay attention to.
• They are mildly diverse. There is a decent balance of men and women. There is some minority representation (eight of ten are white Canadians).
• They are collegial, while recognizing there is an imbalance or a tension between ideologies and values. Surfacing that for inspection is hard when you want to be nice to your colleagues.

They went through the pandemic like everyone else, and learned how to pivot, and that digital, modern services are within reach. The focus and freedom from conflicting priorities afforded by the early pandemic is gone now, though.

How might they advance the resilience and modernization of their organization, while supporting engaged yet functionally disparate teams to deliver on priorities?

Designing for Needs

My boss and I hosted the executive team at the Exchange Lab. We told some stories about the problems we’ve been solving around modern service delivery. We heard about their context and what they want to get better at.

The main blockers I could hear with my Agile tuned ears:

• Cross functional teams are not a thing.
• Teams are empowered to come up with ideas… which can be a distraction from priorities that are not clear.
• There are big meetings to try and untangle this.
• There isn’t buy-in to the current strategic plan or vision (the world has changed).
• There are examples in other jurisdictions they are curious about. Reuse is possibly welcome.
• Their organization is a typical regulator pattern: to some degree, they think this should be relatively easy. However, they are working in complexity and the world has changed.

The explicit ask I estimated I could fit within the timebox (of course they wanted more) was:

• help us learn how to manage the busy work down (limit work in progress),
• give us some insights and tools for prioritizing our work, and
• offer some opportunity for us to spend time becoming more of a team.

I think their ask was spot on in terms of finding a place to get started. And there was an underlying objective I sensed was masked as “help us be a better team:”

Increase visibility of the tension or conflict between us, so that we can address it in a productive way.

I think it is funny and/or telling and/or unfortunate that we don’t ask for this outright more often. I guess “team building” sounds nicer and technically covers it. I’ll press on that I think it does us a disservice sometimes, though. Where we are overly constrained by appreciative inquiry or toxic positivity, the conflict boils on under the surface. Sometimes it is stoked by what feels like a lack of honesty.

Leading up to the session, I scheduled a few more check-ins with the senior Leadership team, including some collaboration building the agenda and resources. I produced a Mural board with the workshop design for the broader team to review. A few weeks out, I invited feedback on what I assumed was needed for inclusive participation, and for people to suggest what else I missed for them. About a third of participants engaged.

I asked them to vote on organizational objectives. These were provided by the big boss and connected to some tangible deliverables, some of which were in flight. I arranged the content in a logic model, so that I could design their real work into the learning session (and so they had some exposure to another structure I’d teach them to use.)

I received mild insight into their readiness to rumble. But also some trepidation in that they’ve tried before, and they know it is hard to do. Challenges with “ideologies” came up as a barrier.

I also sensed they wanted more than I could do within two days. Simply, they want to get on with the work. A well prioritized backlog for their teams to get focused on feels overdue, because they have been working at this with less than ideal conditions.

I sense they hoped the session would simply unlock the time and space to just do what they have been doing even more to get unblocked. Perhaps the session would offer a helpful hack or two as well.

As much as the internet will tell us this, I don’t think it is true that humans can be hacked. What is true is that when you prod a complex system, you cannot necessarily predict what your next move will be until you observe the reaction.

If there is a hack, it is this: pay attention as much as you can and test repeatedly. If you’re thoughtful about it, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to design some practices or structures that help the system get unblocked from some future potential in a direction you sense is good.

The Workshop

For the facilitation nerds, here is the outline of the workshop from an objectives view.

If you’re interested in the detailed facilitation plan, let me know. I’m happy to share, but not inclined to put the work in to make it publish ready unless I hear someone might actually reference it.

Below are some details about the design and experience I enjoyed the most.

Playful learning.

The Scrum Inc. team used an accessible, simple example to demonstrate a relatively complex task: creating value chains. The canvas was “get to work” and the dialogue about coffee, dog walking, and working out or checking email was colourful. It was safe, and illuminated the pitfalls of doing this without facilitation, too.

For my client, they weren’t asking to move to scrum at scale with cross-functional teams, so a value chain exercise wasn’t going to move the dial for them. Instead, I focused on unpacking why it is hard to prioritize.

The exercise was a demonstration with a group of volunteers pretending to be housemates in search of an optimized weekend. We made up 5–7 stickies of activities our weekend might include, and used two approaches to prioritize them: matrix and value-based voting.

For the matrix, the discussion included unpacking how hard a hike might be, and if we could get a refund on concert tickets or not. Also, did we need to clean the house? Will our dinner guest on Monday care?

For values-based voting, we used three pre-determined values: fun, productive, and time sensitive. We tussled a bit on which of these values held more weight and assigned a Fibonacci value to each (I believe they got 5, 8 and 5 respectively). We also examined why “fun” or “productive” are important values and the topic of mental health came up: an unseen value if we hadn’t had discussion and just allowed the productive folks to steamroll the fun-loving group.

Everyone individually assigned the values to the weekend activities if they felt they qualified (or the activity got a zero). Some saw a hike as productive, others did not. That was okay.

The total tally gave us a view to what mattered the most collectively for our mission of “an enjoyable weekend and a good start to the week.”

We skipped the effort/complexity estimate, but I signaled that was missing from the exercise, and that we’d see how that played out with the real work.

Priority democratization for the real work.

Ideally in a democracy you have an informed electorate. For my org, Scrum Inc. facilitated multiple hours of discussion on what values align to our vision and mission and sense of what is important to get the work done (in addition to value stream mapping).

For my client, I needed to accomplish 1:1 dialog, and an exploration of values, within 90 minutes… so, I pre-populated a list of typical values informed by pre-reading about an approach another jurisdiction is taking. I arranged an interview matrix with four questions:

• What is working well in your organization now regarding prioritization?
• What is challenging in your organization now regarding prioritization?
• From the list, what are your top two values, and why?
• From the list, what are your bottom two values, and why?

This enabled everyone to think deeply about what drives their work, and to hear from others. The group report out illuminated that the team of 15 didn’t have full alignment (to be expected). A few of the values stood out as troublesome.

On day two, I refined the list based on their interview matrix results to five values (keeping some of the “trouble” included). The entire group voted on the value weights like we did with the weekend activities and the dialogue was rich and tense at times.

The forceful voices showed up, but tentative rebuttals were enabled by the structure of the numbering system (relative values, not just values in abstract) and the insights from colleagues from the day before. People were listening to each other and seemingly felt supported.

Dialogue surfaced clarity and the complexity attached to the desire to just get the work prioritized and have everyone work in alignment. There’s a reason why they’ve had trouble with it to date: it’s hard to make an ordered list everyone can agree to. Especially hard if the context is very complex.

Once I reminded them that this was fun practice, and that even if it wasn’t the numbers could change… we settled on weights for each value.

Then we switched to looking at the list of work items I produced from a logic model they had seen previously. They played with the priority matrix approach first in three small groups. With the limited view of the small groups, they discussed what they knew about the work, and assigned an impact and effort. There were some notable divergences and very high eye-brows when people walked around to see the results others got.

Next, a worksheet helped each person assign the values to the work. I also asked them to use the same Fibonacci sequence to assign an effort to each item, so that we could divide the value by effort… and get the same “do now, do later” categorization effect we could see on the prioritization matrix.

We stayed in the small groups and observed similar divergences. The group had a very insightful exploration of one particular work item that was quite contested: when discussing value, the question of “value for who” really elevated the groups appreciation for the space to explore.

I vote for voting.

While the matrix and the value-based voting got some similar results, the voting process enabled some problematic power dynamics dissolve for the larger group. The loudest person doesn’t have more weight. The information gets distributed. What feels like insensitive numbers and structures are actually scaffolding for transparency and empathy.

People who might be more informed and right are held accountable for bringing others along.

People who don’t know what is going on can’t remain ignorant (they have to form an opinion).

Additionally, there is a consistent approach for all the work to be processed through. A priority matrix can sometimes flow differently depending on the day of the week, though it still holds a lot of value as being right sized if the scope and group are small enough.

Did it work?

There are signs that the two days I crafted afforded important tensions to surface and be inspected openly. The scenarios included real-ish content. Just enough for some head shaking, frowning, and huffing to be sensed in the room. Just enough to evoke some impassioned pleas and laughter to breakthrough the crossing of arms.

I could still sense the impatience with getting on with the work though. As a recovering people pleaser, I had to manage my own desire to just craft the next best work plan with them.

If the hypothesis behind the intent for this workshop proves out, I might hope for the following:

• They start to have more meaningful conversations at their leadership table that peel back the layers of previously unspoken misalignment.
• They review their current prioritization tools, see where there are gaps, and adapt them with some of the intent and tools we played with.
• They experiment with the logic model, prioritization matrix, or value weighting, and desire focused support to enable adoption of these practices.
• They are more empowered to solve their blockers to more transparent and effective prioritization while limiting and finishing work in progress.

Based on the feedback from the retrospective exercises, there were some good ah-ha moments in the direction I hoped. Not quite as many as I would like, but who knows what else was rattling around for people that didn’t make it onto stickies.

I did sense that my facilitation skills were little rusty (I read between some lines in the post-its… they were quite kind.) Anticipating this, I did arrange for activities that were mostly them interacting with each other. They really valued the 1:1 time.

There were a couple moments where tensions were unspoken but visible in body language and I offered space to explore, without uptake. I wish I had done something differently there. I couldn’t tell if it was the content (disagreement on values) or perhaps discomfort with power dynamics (some people having influence where others think they shouldn’t), or something else. Of course time was running short at that moment.

It’s the hardest part of facilitating… sensing where the learning and objectives might be optimized without opening up for total derailment.

Overall, I am concerned with delivering this amount of team building and learning while time bound to just under two days, with no clear future commitment to ongoing support. Yes, there is internal drive to do something, but when the pattern has been to do multiple things that don’t add up to collective progress, it’s hard to trust the existing conditions and players will be sustained in a new direction. Habits be habits.

The ONLY really sustained, improved org changes I’ve witnessed are ones where there is sufficient unbounding of the status quo mindset and something structural changes (usually more than one thing). For example, adherence to a new practice underpinned by some new assumptions about what matters, while physically meeting differently and consistently, and re-structuring information people share.

In fact, that is precisely the amount of change debt that Scrum Inc. is helping my org adopt. Oh, and we have someone dedicated to making our continuous improvement really happen, full time.

Alas, despite my concerns, I’m not sure I can help my client directly. I mean, my calendar is full now. New priorities are rolling in like a fresh batch of 10-year-olds hopping into bumper cars at the midway (yay fiscal new year). The difference now is that they have to present with the right number of tickets to ride.

What did I miss…

I started with a list… here I am writing about prioritization and can’t even apply it in this one simple exercise. This stuff is hard!

While I did miss a few things I wanted to share (perhaps the exercises I designed for others to use?), this article is long and deep enough. Here are a few last insights I’m reflecting on from the experience:

• Exploring values is a deeply engaging way to surface tensions and generate empathy.
• In a counterintuitive way, quantitative methods are really helpful for surfacing qualitative and intangible elements that may be blocking us.
• It is easy to say we are aligned to excellent values like health, safety, or reconciliation. It isn’t enough to state this and assume we’re doing it. The work needs planning and to be prioritized according to those and other competing values.
• I’m not an expert in this! It’s an exciting learning journey though, and I’m grateful to work for an organization that embraces these kinds of opportunities to experiment and grow.

All in all, I was lucky to get to work with a team that wanted to lean into this next phase of continuously improving their organization.

I’ll be paying attention to their progress over the next year to see if any unblocking really does occur.

H