When “Urgent” Hijacks “Important”

What happens when everything becomes urgent? You guessed it. Nothing important gets enough attention. One of our recent diagnosis exercises for a global manufacturing organisation brought this challenge to the forefront. The organisation was not struggling because people were lazy. Quite the opposite. People were busy. Very busy. The challenge was that immediate business demands were continuously taking precedence over activities required for future sustainability. The initial brief sounded simple:

Prioritisation. But as we spent time with team leads and managers, we realised the issue was deeper. How were projects conceptualised? Who made decisions? What happened between concept and launch? Where did dependencies arise? What did “urgent” actually mean in their environment? The more we explored, the more the original problem statement changed. And that is exactly why diagnosis matters. A training program should ideally evolve as the understanding of the problem deepens.

Rather than saying: “Here is our standard time management module.” we began looking at the actual workflow of the organisation. Because perhaps the issue wasn’t time management. Perhaps it was decision making. Perhaps it was escalation. Perhaps it was planning. Perhaps it was the absence of mechanisms to protect future-oriented work from today’s emergencies. The final intervention therefore had to be built around the reality of their business. And this is one of our favourite parts of consulting.

The problem you are asked to solve is not always the problem you eventually need to solve. Sometimes you need to spend enough time with the organisation to discover the difference.