Combating the silent killer | Task saturation

Combating the silent killer | Task saturation: the biggest risk to flawless execution

What do people do when they feel they have too much to do with the time and resources they have? First up, the good endorphins in our body kick in, and we feel good, energized, ready to climb that mountain and skip down the other side. It’s a great feeling, but it lasts as long as this sentence. Before long, our bodies’ natural ways of dealing with stress get oversaturated. The nervous tension locks you up, and you’ll done of three things: you shut down, you flitter from task to task, or you fix on one thing and one thing only. Trouble is not far away.

The first and most harmless coping mechanism is to shut down. You look at your desk, your emails, your to-do list, and just go blank. Anything else becomes more important, no matter how trivial, as long as it’s not part of that mess. Go for a walk, visit the gym, do your monthly receipts, play a game on the smartphone. That’s fine every now and again, we all need a break. You might even be happy about it,and walk about the office looking for a pointless chat or an evening drinks buddy. But when the next day ticks over with no change, check in with yourself—is this OK, or have you shut down? Any luck, someone will have already noticed. The one good thing about shutting down is that it’s easy to spot.

Flitterers, on the other hand, are bad news. They’re risky because they act busy but do little, and kill you while they’re doing it. Everything they do is part of their job, and they’re not shutting down. They’re not waving that flag that says ‘It’s all too much for me’. But they’re not doing anything important, and not finishing anything at all. Compartmentalizers are specialist flitterers, flitterers with form. Have you ever wanted to get everything in order? Just put everything into nice, neat, calming piles and lines while just beyond your vision the world is burning? Rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Compartmentalizers will make lists, re-plan their project (again, by themselves), file papers, go from top to bottom, and become obsessively linear. Again, that’s OK as a regular routine, keeping things in order so they never get out of control or need a year’s cleanout. But if you’re doing it when your team really needs you to be doing something else, then there is a problem. And the sign is that you’re letting a team down in an uncharacteristic way: a missed deadline, a late arrival, or a communication that just doesn’t make sense.

Finally, there are the channellers. As the name suggests, channellers have tunnel vision, focussed or fixated on one thing to the exclusion of all others. Most of us are potential channellers when things go wrong—80 percent of all people—and the examples are almost too many and too painful to recall. The cable company so determined to plant their new advertising campaign on the airwaves that they didn’t think through whether their connection staff were able to meet the new demand. The day we just have to get something ‘out the door’, and close our ears and minds to any distraction, any phone call, any unplanned event that might interfere with getting the job done.

Keeping people to the plan

Whether it’s task saturation or overconfidence, the result is the same: a lack of focus that can be fatal to missions, personal dreams, careers,and even lives. Pilots know that threat, and prepare for it as part of their plan. They use their checklists, focus on their central indicator,cross-check on the others, and use their wingmen. Wingmen check for blind spots and signs of task saturation, and pilots never go anywhere without a wingman. It’s all part of their plan.

In this post we’ll look at the use of a central indicator and cross checking as a means to overcoming saturation.

Your dashboard, with primary (attitude) indicator and cross-checks

There are about 350 indicators in the cockpit of a fighter or a commercial jet. Nobody can keep track of 350 indicators. The  answer is to be able to see four or five indicators clearly at all times, and if there’s anything unexpected with them, start looking at the relevant others. Still,how would you or a business keep an eye on four, five, eight, or twelve indicators at a time? We would humbly suggest the dashboard layout of our cockpit. It’s been designed, tested, and improved over billions of flying hours by millions of pilots flying under direct combat, safety and commercial pressures.

The dashboard has all the indicators you need to see, in a hub-and-spoke layout. The center hub is the primary indicator. For pilots, that’s the attitude indicator or ‘artificial horizon’. If you can only do one thing, you keep the plane level. (One look at the attitude indicator would have saved Flight 401.) The secondary indicators form the spokes. They’re all important, so a pilot will scan the dashboard constantly, and every scan passes over the centre hub. It’s the hub-and-spoke layout of the cockpit cross-check.

Many businesses  use dashboards, but there are  three standout features to the cockpit-style dashboard that aren’t often seen. First, the primary indicator is the largest image and is at the center: you can’t miss it. Second, all of the indicators are visual: You don’t have to read anything when your eyes are rattling. You can quickly scan across the dashboard and see that the indicators are where they should be. Third and most importantly, if the indicators are not where you want them, you will

know what you should do to adjust, correct, guide, and get the indicator back where it should be. For each dial, there is a corresponding action to take to move the needle.

Your business will have its own key performance indicators, and these will make up the company’s dashboard. Because it’s the CEO’s dashboard, it will show the CEO’s priorities. Some dashboards will have the share price as the central attitude meter, others will have profit, or revenue, or margin, all depending on the company’s current strategy and priorities.

Should everyone in the company be focussing on that dashboard? No. People at different layers and within different teams will have their own missions with their own objectives. The indicator that shows whether their own objective is being met should be that team’s primary indicator. Other indicators should reveal factors that may contribute to that objective. The CEO’s profit indicator, for example, may appear as a secondary indicator to be cross-checked, because that may reveal whether unbudgeted resources are available (or not) to help meet your objective.

Many companies want their employees to have one universal dashboard. But that implies everyone in the company should have the same priorities as the CEO. Would that distract them from their daily mission, the one they’re assessed and paid on? You bet. Keep it on the side, but not centre. It’s not their priority.

In my next post we’ll look at one of the most underutilized tools in business – the checklist.

Read the previous post in this 3 part series – Managing Task Saturation | How People Lose Focus

 

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/combating-task-saturation-part-ii/