Wednesday, November 20, 2013

It's urgent -- but not important


Kotter* says: Provoke urgency to get change moving

In your project life, you are going to be faced from time to time with both establishing/promoting urgency and importance as possible tools you go to in affecting change.

A few words about these popular choices:
  • One thing to keep in mind is that urgency and importance are not the same thing. Many things that are urgent are simply not that important... they are urgent only because they have a temporal sequencing issue that puts them at the head of the line and a need to do now.
  • And, many important things may have weak sequencing demands, so long as -- in the end --they get done.
Kotter, of course, is using urgency as a prod to get things going. The caution is the familiar bromide:  "Nothing is urgent if everything is urgent".




* John P. Kotter, "Leading Change"

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