In operations, as in business broadly, we are constantly fighting to keep revenue generating activities going in order to fulfill the demands of the business. There's always a production target, a quota, a sales order to fill, and falling behind means working that much harder to catch up next month.

Similarly, production targets correlate to growth targets, which increase every year. Maintaining the status quo in operations is a guaranteed way to make the job harder in the future, so there needs to be some sort of progress made to become more efficient year over year.

People everywhere have heard the adage to “Do more with less”. Most, maybe rightfully so, have been jaded from past exposure to the invocation of this advice. But for those of us who view this more as a challenge than an oxymoronic impossibility, how do we implement this in practice?

Today is here right now, tomorrow might not be

Let's start from the beginning - I'm talking prehistoric times. We all have a biological imperative to satisfy our most urgent needs - air, water, food, shelter - the necessities of survival. Maslow contends that only once these are met, can we focus on less urgent needs such as safety, then relationships, esteem, and if we’re lucky, self-actualization.

If we transpose this to the operations world, who cares about what next year's production targets will be when we have this year's targets to hit? Our need for survival - to stay in business, to feed our families - preoccupies our thoughts. Most operations personnel are motivated by this immediacy.

We have evolved to feel a dopaminergic high when we accomplish a task. As an evolutionary mechanism, this is incredibly useful. Risk provides the negative motivating factor, and success provides the positive motivating reward.

On a typical production floor, operators will find much more fulfillment from work that satisfies production needs than anything else. The positive emotions associated with completing something urgent is a very easy reward to get hooked on, but just like any drug, tends to focus the user’s efforts on behaviors that will earn more of that reward.

The slow will die

Bringing it back to Maslow, he places safety needs just above the physiological needs. Humanity rose to be the world's apex predator because we had one characteristic that no other species had, the speed of our thoughts.

We could outthink other animals faster than they could react. We invented tools, advanced communication methods, complex tactical plans. We could absorb more inputs from the world around us, process them faster, and produce coordinated sets of actions that catapulted us to the top of the food chain.

The value of this processing speed is no different in business. Companies are made up of people, after all. The faster a business can absorb inputs, process them, and produce desirable outputs, the more successful it will be. An organization needs to be fast to respond to changing market conditions, quality issues, or production stoppages. The survival of the company depends on its ability to make decisions faster than its competition.

So what happens to those who aren't fast? Well, they die. Everyone is searching for solutions that make our lives easier and satisfy a need that's found somewhere on Maslow's pyramid. People naturally gravitate towards companies that can do this better. If a company’s operations don't keep up, it won't have customers to sustain it, and it goes out of business and dies.

Ike saves the day

This has been a long, roundabout way of getting to the meat of the matter. We have two needs that are competing for our focus. Our survival depends on the satiation of the urgency of our daily obligations, but our long term success requires investment in the important, efficiency-increasing activities now, for tomorrow's sake.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a popular framework used to triage the seemingly endless stream of tasks that permeates the week. It treats importance and urgency not as competing forces that need to be prioritized one over the other, but as separate dimensions along which to rank any given task and then disposition appropriately.

In the diagram above, each quadrant contains a recommended action that helps focus your attention on what is truly important and urgent. An injury out on the shop floor is both urgent AND important so it must be taken care of right away. An email asking everyone to rank their favorite cartoon character is neither important nor urgent and should be deleted immediately.

Every organization and every person in that organization is different, so which tasks fall into which quadrant varies from person to person. A Quadrant III tasks might actually be a Quadrant I task for someone else, so why not delegate this to them?It’s clear that we want to spend most of our time in Quadrant I, but most of us struggle to adequately handle tasks in Quadrant II and III. And of course, we’ve all found ourselves doing something in Quadrant IV even though we know better.

This framework is easy to grasp, but difficult to adhere to. We always want to be moving our focus up and to the left on this chart. Achieving consistency in our own tasks is an accomplishment in itself but, for those in leadership positions, delegating our Quadrant III tasks to those for whom it can become a Quadrant I task is the next level of mastery.

Maslow might have correctly identified and stratified our needs, but we can satisfy two levels of that hierarchy simultaneously as long as we apply the correct tools. For time-strapped operations personnel, we might just be able to prioritize appropriately enough to make our teams successful.

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