If you’ve spent any amount of time in a leadership role, you’ve probably heard someone describe your organization as being in a state of chaos at one point or another. Projects are slipping, people are frustrated, meetings create more work than solutions. And if you’re like me, you experience conditions where priorities change weekly, and everyone is “too busy,” and yet meaningful progress isn’t happening.
It’s easy to look at an organization like this and conclude that it has too many projects, too few resources, poor communication, or ineffective leadership. Those things may all be true. They are also symptoms.
The deeper question is why those symptoms exist.
After working with organizations across a variety of industries, I’ve noticed that many situations described as “chaos” share a common characteristic: people are working hard, decisions are being made, and work is getting done, but there isn’t a common understanding of what the organization is ultimately trying to accomplish. How I often hear that is, “what is our strategy” or “what exactly are we trying to do here?” Some people get it, most do not. Without a common understanding, every decision becomes more difficult than it needs to be.
When there is no clarity—or a significant number of people lack it—priorities are next to impossible to establish. You can declare a priority all you want, but your team won’t fully commit because they don’t understand what you’re trying to do. Teams begin working toward different interpretations of success. New ideas compete with existing commitments. Urgent requests interrupt important work. Resources become strained because everything appears to deserve attention, and everything is a priority. Everything is on fire, so to speak.
Eventually the organization reaches a point where it feels overwhelmed. At that stage, the problem often surfaces as workload, staffing, budgeting, or project management. While those may contribute to the situation, they rarely explain how the organization arrived there.
The underlying issue is usually much simpler: the destination is not clear.
When that happens, departments develop their own perspectives. Managers begin solving the problems immediately in front of them. Every team works hard to improve the areas they control, and although the organization continues moving, it isn’t moving cohesively or in alignment.
This is one reason many organizations experience competing priorities.
Competing priorities rarely begin because people disagree about what is important. More often, they arise because people are working toward different destinations, or different interpretations of the same destination. Research has consistently shown that organizations with clear strategic priorities execute more effectively than those attempting to pursue too many initiatives at once.
Once clarity is established, difficult decisions become considerably easier. A project can be postponed because it doesn’t support the objective. A meeting can end with a decision because everyone evaluates the options against the same goal. An initiative can be declined because it distracts from the direction the organization has already chosen.
Notice that none of those decisions required additional resources. They required a clearer understanding of where the organization was trying to go.
Whenever I encounter an organization, a team, or an individual that feels overwhelmed, I tend to begin with three questions:
- Where are you trying to go?
- What’s stopping you from getting there?
- What do you need to overcome that?
At first glance these seem simple. In practice, they are surprisingly difficult to answer. The first question establishes clarity. It forces everyone to define success in the same terms, and it forces individuals to understand the real target of what they are trying to do.
The second question identifies the barrier preventing progress. Rather than discussing every problem the organization faces, attention becomes focused on the obstacle that matters most. You’d be surprised how many times there is only one stalling or blocking issue that is preventing progress. It’s easy to think there are “so many reasons” why we can’t move forward, until you have to verbalize it and realize that it’s usually one issue.
And so, the third question shifts the discussion toward action. Its purpose is to identify what must happen to remove that barrier so progress can continue. When phrased this way, we tend to realize that the solution is often simpler than we thought.
Clarify the destination. Identify the barrier. Lift the barrier.
Every organization experiences periods where work feels difficult and progress seems slow. Before assuming the answer is to have more people, hold more meetings, buy better software, or adopt another planning exercise, take the time to understand where you’re trying to go. Once the destination becomes clear, many of the decisions that once seemed overwhelming begin to sort themselves out naturally.