Every business has a lot of areas that would benefit from improvement or require your attention. If you want to be brutally honest, every business has way too many things it could focus on. Our focus is such an important asset. You know what can happen when you put focused attention on something. You also know what can happen when you take focus from things. 

So how do you decide what to focus on? I was in a meeting recently to make big decisions about priorities. We didn’t have a good framework for how the group was going to decide on what to do next. So, there was a lot of confusion about how to decide from a list of ideas. Do we determine the next best thing to do based on revenue potential, cost, or time to market? What’s more important in a discussion about priorities? The list of things you can do or the ways in which you’re going to stack rank them? I think agreement needs to be made about how you’re going to decide on what’s most important first, even before you make the list of possible priorities.

For example, if your business is struggling with declining profits, you can set out on a path to decide the prioritized list of things you can do to increase profits. In these situations, I like to follow Walt Disney’s methodology that involved first dreaming, then realizing, and critiquing. It was important to him that the dreamers be able to dream without constraints. Too often we start nitpicking ideas before we’ve even let creative juices flow. I love the use of PostIt Notes and timed sessions to gather ideas. What could we do to increase profits, one idea per post it notes in a five-minute timed session. Then you go around, and each person presents one idea each until they are all presented. Then you start grouping them, then you start prioritizing them, then you stop and pick the best three because everyone has limited time and money.