How to prioritise
When you’re trying to make progress on sustainability / impact there are always so many things you could work on. You can’t do them all.
To help you move forward and make progress, you need to prioritise. Today, I’ll share some tools to help you do that.
Mapping onto a matrix
Step 1. Either on a wall or an online whiteboard, draw this matrix:
Step 2. Write all the possible your activities onto post it notes (real or virtual) - one activity per post it note.
Step 3. Map the post its onto the matrix. It’s not an exact science – more about which quadrant things end up in.
Use this matrix to inform your approach to each set of activities:
Some tips:
Do this as a multi-disciplinary team to reduce the chances of missing something crucial in your assessment.
Don’t overthink this – it’s a tool to help with prioritisation, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Use a RAG table to go deeper on items in the top right box
Even though you’ve now got a smaller list of priorities, you still might not be able to do everything in the top right box. At least not straight away. A RAG table can help you prioritise these activities further.
Step 1. Create a table and put the different activities you could do down the left hand side.
Step 2. Across the top, put the criteria that you want to assess the different activities against. These criteria will be specific to your business - for example, influenced by your strategic priorities.
Step 3. Rate each activity against each of the criteria using a red-amber-green rating.
Here’s an example of what you might create:
In this example, project 3 is clearly the one to work on first.
The prioritisation of projects 1, 2 and 4 is less clear cut – there will need to be an element of discussion and judgement in deciding next steps. This is where using small experiments can help – you might be able to test out critical assumptions for all three projects rather than committing to a specific one at this stage.
For more practical advice on how to get clarity on what steps to take to scale up your impact, check out my FREE Scale Up Your Impact Guide: