Managing Priorities Better With Agile Marketing

“IT’S A NEW PRIORITY. A BIG ONE.”

We’ve all had leaders with a penchant for presenting a constant flow of new priorities. Those that believe everything is one. And, with regularity, they add to an already long list of them.

Even with the best of intentions, the “swoop and poop” moments tend to create chaos with unplanned marketing work. It’s a real issue with our effectiveness and compels us to find better ways to handle the repetitive and disruptive nature of it all.

WHEN EVERYTHING IS A PRIORITY, NOTHING IS A PRIORITY

When we are overloaded with priorities we begin to notice problematic by-products.

There's confusion from what we were told was important yesterday but is less so today. There's the inability to establish flow with focused work and, the unneeded stress from an overwhelming and frenetic pace with no end in sight. What quickly follows is a decline in morale and lower satisfaction with leadership and it begins to take a real toll.

BETTER OPERATING SYSTEMS INSTEAD OF COMPLAINING

I’ve been there many times. I understand no matter how respectfully marketers try to bring attention to expanding and competing priorities, we don’t want to sound like we’re whining or complaining. That gets us nowhere fast.

Yet, for marketing to hone its focus and effectiveness, we can’t get caught in the hamster wheel of “just one more thing” ad infinitum. Unfortunately, our appeals fall short because they don’t adequately protect against the problem both upstream and downstream.

So, better than feeble pleas or complaints, we need a better operating system for managing in our modern marketing environments. An OS that runs a solid upstream offense to create a better-balanced downstream defense.

HYPER-PRIORITIES & HIPPOS

What defines a priority? Hopefully, clear alignment with business goals and outcomes shaped to deliver value. Typically, well thought-through, well understood, and effectively communicated rallying points for our focused efforts. Occasionally, something time-sensitive or urgent (i.e. newsjacking opportunity) and we need to adjust and respond appropriately. Note occasionally.

But we know that’s not always the case.

Many additional priorities are audibles called out by the HIPPO (highest important paid person’s opinion) in our leadership or from influential stakeholders. It’s common and difficult to manage because of whom you are dealing with.

Ultimately, it is a reflection of the command and control hierarchy at its finest.

UNFORTUNATELY, COMMAND AND CONTROL IS ALL WE KNOW

The past century of business, shaped by every business school out there, instilled and reinforced hierarchical control in management philosophy (i.e. Taylorism). And, it's become about as systemic as anything can get.

At issue is a style of management that does not sync with today’s need to enhance employee empowerment and deliver optimal value in our customer experiences. As such, significant gaps are growing and showing.

So from the awareness of what got us here, we now need a big rethink at all levels including hierarchies and styles of management that demand better filters be put in place.

BETTER PRIORITY “FILTERS” WITH AGILE MARKETING

Agile Marketing adoption is growing because agility applied to marketing holds a range of benefits. At the operating system level, agility provides us air cover by acting as a better filter across areas, including management of HIPPO-centric tendencies.

In terms of upstream filtering, the best scenario sees executives and leaders self-regulate from an understanding and adopting the mindset, values, and principles that breed success with agility.

However, that’s unicorns and rainbows expecting things to take hold immediately at that level of adoption.

More realistic upstream impacts with leadership come from pragmatic and ongoing filtering that identifies and stack ranks true priorities together, in collaboration. Getting us on the same page and keeping us there, reinforced by transparency in our work, processes, and outcomes.

With regards to downstream filtering further within our processes, it facilitates the empowerment of our people and teams. It is up to them to determine the highest priorities of work that will deliver immediate customer value.

Self-managing teams become their own filter, applying scoring models like ICE to prioritize the highest value work based on Impact, Confidence, and Effort while minimizing influence or bias in deciding what to tackle first.

VISUALIZATION & VALIDATION FILTERS

Teams themselves help repel potential disruptions by way of practicing the visualization of their work on boards, serving as a visual filter. This simple element makes it quite hard for leaders to ignore everything that’s going when it is on full display for all to see and grasp.

Visualization is an effective deterrent and defense against being asked to do more without having to say a word.

A final filter to mention in the operating system comes from validated learning. Validation is where our hypotheses, tests, and feedback loops show us what works and what doesn’t. This is a simple old-school direct marketing practice that seems to have been lost in today’s bright shiny world of digital outputs versus outcomes.

With the rigor of empirical evidence via outcome measurement, negotiating becomes easier when there's absolute certainty any and all new “priorities” will be measured to reveal if they were brilliant or bogus.

Further, with measurement transparency embedded in everything we do, we build a breadth of examples to help inform us of the efficacy of new “asks” compared with previous ones of a similar nature.

GETTING TO THE POWER OF “NO” BY MAXIMIZING WORK NOT DONE

Priorities will never go away. There will always be new ones just around the corner and no system will ever be perfect. And yes, there will also always be HIPPOS in our midst.

So what does “getting to no” mean? Properly framed, our intention does not imply an outright NO with any unplanned work or interruptions. Marketers know what self-preservation means. “No” is more about achieving balance and beneficial outcomes. One of those outcomes is maximizing work not done so we can focus on what really counts.

“No” in this regard means understanding AND practicing “work not done” as a filter, connecting upstream and downstream considerations and implications with full transparency in our new OS.

WE NEED SYSTEM-THINKING TO PREVENT MESSING WITH OUR SYSTEM

Marketing has always been challenged to show how we can manage with greater effectiveness and efficiencies. Yet. the opaque nature of our traditional marketing management regime has come to harm our overall reputation. Marketing's stigma to overcome is we've historically failed to demonstrate a reliable system that underpins all that we do. System-thinking applies here.

Addressing that gap, the mindset, values, and principles of agility as a discipline to apply to the discipline of marketing can point us to the right priorities with filters to keep us focused and minimize the interruptions that get us side-tracked.

Suffice to say, marketing needs a system to help prevent messing with the system.

Agile Marketing can be that and more.

This post first appeared on the Change Marketing Blog