This archive report was first published on 7 July 2020.
As a leader, have you ever attended a conference where groundbreaking ideas were discussed, only to see those initiatives collect dust years later? This is a common phenomenon, and it's not because we lack knowledge about what to do. The problem lies in execution.
Former US President Dwight Eisenhower once said, 'I have two kinds of problems: The urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent.' This quote, attributed to J. Roscoe Miller, president of Northwestern University, has become known as the Eisenhower Matrix.
Stephen Covey popularized this concept in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He explained that tasks can be categorized into four quadrants: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and not urgent or important.
Let's focus on the first two quadrants. The ideal is to operate in quadrant two, where you have control and are in charge of things. In quadrant one, you're in reactionary mode, and this is the quadrant of high pressure.
When training on execution, I conduct an exercise where participants are divided into groups and given a secret task to accomplish within a set time frame. The results are striking: the group given the least amount of time often performs the best, while those with more time tend to relax and discuss how to approach the task.
This phenomenon highlights the importance of inducing a state of emergency, which can trigger innovation and creativity. By cutting out irrelevancies and focusing on the important and strategic aspects, we can achieve more in less time.
— Wale Akinyemi is the chief transformation officer, PowerTalks
