Tasks Murder Strategy

Years ago, upon first moving to Texas in a post-graduate school haze, I had this job. It started out pretty interesting and fun and community-laden, and over time it became a hellhole based on my own issues and some of their organizational ones. At the time, something I noticed daily was a massive over-focus on tasks to the exclusion of any actual strategy or long-term, well, anything. I was starting to blog more, in part because of boredom at that job, and I wrote this little ditty on daily deliverables murdering strategy in many orgs.

Flash forward about eight years, and 1.5 weeks ago, I had a call with someone I work with where one comment was “You have too many ideas. What I need is someone who drills on tasks.” Indeed. That was from a senior leader.

I’ve never really understood conceptually why ideas would be bad, and tasks would be good — but if you think about it, it makes a ton of sense. Tasks are controllable outcomes, which businesses and senior-type people tend to like. You can “check off” something and have a sense of process and completeness. Thinking about bigger issues is much more challenging, it’s hard to incorporate multiple levels of feedback, and businesses are pivoting a ton these days anyway, so what is “long-term” really? Three-four weeks?

Still, this over-focus on tasks limits businesses in many ways, as you can see here with a story about Navy Seals, the Civil Rights movement, and the San Antonio Spurs.

You also need to consistently remember that managers are historically poor judges of new ideas, and have a hard time setting their own priorities — in fact, their priorities and daily focus are often completely dictated by tasks, i.e. meetings, calls, check-ins, and stand-ups. It’s hard to find the “lift” needed for actual strategy in that world.

One of the most popular things I’ve written in the past two years is tied to all this — it’s about the “flattening of the to-do list” and the over-quest for optimization, meaning that life can seem like task after task that either needs to be completed or “hacked” in some way, and that’s driving some of the burnout and mental health discussions we’ve been having a bit more of late.

It’s relatively clear that in modern work, tasks are the king, and strategy is the presupposed king but really the pauper.

Takes?