The discipline of discernment
As leadership teams look toward the coming year, the number of decisions competing for attention grows quickly.
Capital, talent, technology, and growth all demand resources. At the same time, changing market conditions make long-term assumptions harder to rely on.
The result is a familiar leadership problem: several priorities may be legitimate, but they cannot all receive the same attention.
Discernment is the discipline of deciding where leadership attention will have the greatest value.
The question is: What deserves our attention now?
The Pebble
Discernment starts by putting competing priorities in the same view.
A useful discipline is:
Inventory. Filter. Prioritize. Declare.
Inventory the decisions, investments, and unresolved issues competing for leadership attention.
Filter them against what the business needs most right now. Which issue has the greatest effect on cash or customers? Which one becomes more expensive or harder to address if it waits? Which one best fits the direction and values of the organization?
Prioritize the issue that deserves greater focus now.
Then Declare it.
That final step turns an executive priority into an organizational one.
When people know what leadership is trying to understand, they can connect what they hear from customers and what they see inside the business to that issue.
Leadership gives the organization a clear lens for identifying information that deserves attention.
That creates a better-informed decision before significant resources are committed.
The Ripple
Put the discipline into practice. Choose the issue that deserves the most leadership attention over the next seven days.
Frame it clearly enough that people across the business know what you are trying to understand.
Then share it with the people closest to the issue and ask them to bring back what they see through the normal course of their work.
Ask them:
What are customers telling us that relates to this?
What are we learning that could change the decision?
At the end of the week, bring those observations together and look at the issue again.
The goal is to improve the quality of the decision before significant resources are committed.
For me, the question this week is: How do we accelerate the development of middle leaders inside our organizations?
The Question
What is the single most important issue you want your organization thinking about over the next seven days? Have you clearly declared it?
