# Real-world example: prioritising with buckets

- **Episode:** [145](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/145.md) (2024-11-14)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** prioritization, real-world-example
- **Time:** 20:58–26:04 (start 1258s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/145?t=1258](https://truthliesandwork.com/145?t=1258)

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[20:58] Laura Barnard: Yeah, so, one of the organizations that we worked with was a smaller services-based organization. And they were really struggling with this problem. And it was, we were trying to get them to prioritize their client-facing projects. And they looked at me like I had 3 heads and they said, well, obviously they're all important. They're all paying customers. And in this case, there were some not so happy customers that had been on the phone with me threatening lawsuits and very frustrated as I talked to these CEOs. And I said, how about we take a look at those that are kind of really mad at us right now with big outstanding balances? Let's put our focus on solving their problems first, because if we do, we will increase revenue. We will not have angry customers, and we will start moving the needle on those projects first. Then we'll put those and kind of the big revenue generators in category A. And then, then we'll take this next group of customers and we'll put them in category B. And then the, the ones that are kind of like the lower maintenance, lower, you know, smaller changes or aren't really driving a lot of revenue
[22:09] Al Elliott: Yeah
[22:09] Laura Barnard: We'll put those in category C. And we called them buckets. So we had bucket A, bucket B, and bucket C. And it wasn't a 1 through N priority list, but it was a way for people to start thinking a little bit differently about where I should put my focus. Instill focus is the first step of the Impact Driver Mindset Shift, which is an acronym that's I is for instill focus. And that was one of their biggest problems is that they were treating everything like it was a number one priority. And as a result, Nobody knew what to work on, which means, and this is what we explained. I explained to the C-suite team. I said, "Listen, the result of this is that people are just responding to the squeaky wheel or the person complaining the most or the angry customer that calls, and when they drop everything to focus on that thing, all the other commitments that they've already made aren't happening. So you can't plan. You can't make good business decisions. You can't make commitments to your customers, which means your." Your brand in the industry is struggling because people are saying, I can't rely on anything they tell us. And so, I said, is that important to you? Well, of course it is. Okay. So then we're going to need to do something to change that. So, what we did is we didn't get them to the 1 through N priority right away, but we did get them to say bucket A, bucket B, bucket C, and then use that language to drive decisions in the organization. And the way it would work is that the C-suite would meet every day for a daily standup, which is another agile framework kind of a mindset, 15-minute daily standup where everyone stands up, talks about their top priority for the day, and they would use that bucket language. Well, what happened is that as that started cascading down into teams and the teams had more clarity around even this high level of priority, they could make and did make better decisions on their own. About where to focus based on those buckets, right? And they would say, okay, well, we're going to deal with this angry customer on a project that's super late. Let me do my part on that so I can pass that off to the next person so that they can get their thing done. But what happened is that there was an almost immediately tangible, recognizable, measurable increase in speed to For those projects, getting the throughput on those projects accelerated so much that we were off of those and onto the next set of priorities so fast. And it was all just by shifting the way they thought about what mattered and making some decisions. And sorry, as an executive, you have to make decisions and you have to decide, do you want everyone to be busy or do you want them to be productive? Outcome-focused and driving better business outcomes for the organization
[24:59] Al Elliott: Is that the key? It has to come from top down, that prioritization?
[25:03] Laura Barnard: It does, but it doesn't have to be the very top senior leader only in the organization. Even if you're managing, if any of your listeners are just managing a team or just managing your own work, right? You just have to choose how you want to operate. Do you want to operate in a way where you are constantly late, feeling busy, feeling stressed, overwhelmed? Or do you want to have clear, focused direction, goals? And frankly, you'll get a lot more done. I think that's what a lot of people— what we've found when we have to go do this with some C-suite executives, they get really anxious until we explain how it's going to work, not realizing that if they apply the techniques that we teach them, They are going to 2x, 3x, 4x, and sometimes even 5x the results of the projects they can complete in a single year. So, while, let's say, in your organization you were going to get 20 projects done a year, what would happen if you could do 100?