Fighting Fires
May 1st, 2008 by Cali & Jody
We thought we’d give a bump to Kelly Forrister’s recent entry on her Simply GTD (Getting Things Done) blog about David Allen’s 3-Fold nature of work:
Doing Pre-defined Work (choosing from what’s already processed and organized on your lists and calendar)
Doing Work as it Appears (responding to latest, loudest and new opportunities)
Defining Work (your own processing and reviewing time)
We’ve found that in corporate America, the second category gets the most attention. At Best Buy, we called them “fire drills” and, like the name suggests, the “latest, loudest” opportunities were often false alarms. Just like in school, everyone lined up single file, marched where the teachers (we mean leaders) told us to march, and then went back to our regular jobs once the all-clear was sounded.
ROWE changed all that. In a ROWE, every employee has the right (even the obligation) to challenge a request to interrupt their work. Because the focus is on results, people are empowered to ask the kind of questions you ask when you feel a sense of ownership in the business:
Is this perceived emergency a genuine emergency?
If it is, does dropping everything I’m doing right now best serve the results we’re trying to drive, or can it wait?
If it can’t wait, then what can we do in the future to make sure this kind of emergency doesn’t happen again? Can we plan better so we’re not in crisis mode the next time this issue comes up?
This is all commonsense stuff. However, if the people in an organization aren’t using a ROWE mindset, then they don’t get the opportunity to use commonsense. Of course real emergencies are always going to come up. But what if more of the work you did fell into categories one and three? What if you first defined work and then spent your day doing the pre-defined work you established for yourself the day, week or month before?
And for those of you who want to jump on this notion with comments about the chaotic nature of the global, 24/7 economy we have this question:
How much of any of the challenges we face today as businesspeople are perceived challenges? And how many of them are just the same old business concerns with a bright, shiny, technological face on them? In other words, how much of the world is genuinely on fire?
Wow. White text on pale yellow on the “LEAVE A REPLY” fields. Is that a ROWE strategy of some sort, or just an eyesight test?
Great post!
This reminds me of a simple 2×2 grid that one of the best managers I ever had drew for me. The x-axis was “Urgency” and the y-axis was “Importance.” Her point was that it’s easy to spend an undue amount of time on “Very Urgent…but Not Overly Important” work, which I think is analogous to Allen’s “Doing Work As It Appears” category. It can be tough to resist, but the ROWE approach sounds like a pretty cool tactic to fight it!
I would even say that the global 24/7 economy is one more reason to avoid fire drills.
Emergencies usually go like this: “Buddy, drop everything, the CEO needs this list in 5 minutes because he’ll meet the Board of Directors in 10.”
Only in a global 24/7 economy, Buddy might be in the middle of an M&A on another continent and switched off his mobile phone because it’s 3 am where he is.
So eliminating all (non-critical) emergencies as suggested by C&J sounds like a great idea to me.
@Tim
The 2×2 grid is also called “Eisenhower Principle”. Funny enough, I also first heard about it from a former manager (I can still see him using my whiteboard to explain it).
The way I express this is that if everything is a crisis, then nothing really is. There is no “cost” to declaring everything an emergency, so people do.
The so called “emergencies” at work remind me of when I was a teenager with a pager. Someone could page you and put in a 911 into it, meaning that it was REALLY important and to drop everything and call. When you made that call, it was usually something extremely lame. Why do I feel like the managers who call these “emergency” meetings are the same people who would type 911 into a page, just to get you to call back for some inane reason.