Rather than just offering advice and guidance, I'm also trying to explore some hypotheses in this space. Please send me your thoughts via email or leave a comment, I'm curious about what other people think.

On every leadership team I've been a part of, I've found that people differ most broadly on how they allocate their time and attention. Furthermore, how people say they allocate their time and attention differs from what they do in practice. I recently encountered a framework that I haven't seen before that suggests an efficient approach to prioritizing leaders' time.

The framework comes from the approach effective altruism takes cause prioritization, but don't get distracted by the origin. The framework is ITN – importance, tractability, and neglectedness. In the original writeup there's math but that's really not the important part. The critical insight embedded in this framework is that there's more to allocating your time than deciding what's important.

When I really started thinking about how leadership teams engage, I noticed that leadership teams often ask only one question: "Is this important?" I found that a second followup question is necessary: "Will our involvement be helpful?" In my experience, attention from leaders can often be a needless distraction rather than part of a solution and that they need to exercise prudence. Besides, investing time in matters where the team won't add value is really inefficient.

The Importance, Tractability, and Neglectedness framework is a major upgrade on that basic idea. I'll save Importance for last because it's the most contingent on the leader's particular circumstances, and focus on the other two first.

Tractability

Tractability is the degree to which the organization has the capacity to solve the problem in question within a certain time frame. I'll provide a real life example of a low tractability problem and why it was a trap.

At work most of our backend systems are microservices running on Kubernetes, but a lot of our core data and core business logic still resides in a monolithic legacy application. It works well enough but is still an inconvenience, because most of our backend developers aren't comfortable working on the monolith for a variety of reasons. Prior to my arrival the leadership spent a lot of time on a low tractability problem – eliminating the monolith entirely. The effort required to do so is so massive that it would exhaust our engineering resources and likely take years, greatly reducing our capacity to ship things that create value for our customers.

What we've done instead is go back to the problem statement (most backend developers aren't comfortable working on the monolith) and stepping away from the low tractability solution, eliminating the monolith. We are instead focusing on more tractable solutions – moving the monolith to Kubernetes so it operates similarly to our other services and making the monolith more approachable for our backend developers so that they're comfortable working in that environment.

When I encountered this framework, it really sunk in how important it is to keep tractability at the center of our thoughts. One thing that happened with the monolith was that focusing on an intractable solution made the problem itself seem intractable. In the end that was really demotivating because it felt like we were just going to be stuck with the problem. We benefitted greatly by revisiting the original problem statement.

Spending time on intractable problems is incredibly inefficient and often reduces team cohesion as people spend time in pointless debate. It's OK to say, "We're not going to solve this problem right now" when it's true.

Neglectedness

Let's set aside the fact that neglectedness is not a real word. I did some research into real words that capture the concept but I couldn't find any satisfying alternatives, so I'm going with it. The point here is that leaders need to ask themselves whether a problem or situation is already getting the attention it deserves when deciding whether to get involved.

If a problem is prioritized correctly, the resources devoted to it are sufficient, and the right people are working on it, how much more can you, as a leader, do? Perhaps if you have actual expertise that would be beneficial you should get more involved, but otherwise it's probably best to spend time on problems that rank higher from an ITN perspective.

How do you know when a problem is neglected? I'd argue that it's when the importance and tractability are misaligned. A problem may be intractable for one person but highly tractable for a small cross-functional working group. If the problem is important enough to merit that level of effort but you still have only one person working on it (or aren't working on it at all), it's neglected. In other words, neglectedness is the state created by misprioritization (another word that's not in the dictionary).

One of the most important jobs for leaders is to shine a light on problems and opportunities that are completely neglected, and more specifically to make sure the appropriate level of attention is paid to opportunities that are tractable in the long term but intractable in the short term. Generally speaking, tractable short term problems are rarely neglected, and tractable long term challenges are treated as intractable so they feel safe to ignore.

The reason this is a framework, though, is that neglectedness isn't enough. Any company is correctly neglecting a lot of challenges in order to maintain the focus required to address the challenges that are most important. Just as dwelling on intractable problems can really sap a team's energy, constantly revisiting matters that are neglected but not important can be a massive distraction. If the relative importance of a neglected problem hasn't changed, leave it alone.

Importance

That brings it back to importance. There are plenty of great books about figuring what's important, that's what strategy is. What I'll say is that this framework won't work (nor will any other) if there's not broad agreement on what's important, because without that no allocation of attention and resources will make sense to everyone. The need for a workable strategy is always a tractable problem, it's incredibly important, and yet it's often neglected.

It's Never This Simple

1. Not everyone is going to agree on what's important, tractable, or neglected, and so there will always be some negotiation and consensus-building required on these matters.
2. Time frames matter, something may be intractable in the short term but highly tractable in the long term, or be important in the short term and unimportant in the long term. The goal of these exercises should always be to build confidence that we're doing the right things in the present, but that's a different post.
3. If you already read this post, you know that I believe that understanding where your boss stands on these matters is really crucial, and that you'll need to keep their point of view in mind. A difference of opinion between you and your boss on the ITN of a situation is likely a really useful topic to chat about.
4. Sometimes the greatest innovations come from taking on seemingly intractable problems. It's probably worth revisiting the really important matters that are neglected because they seem intractable every now and then.
5. Things change – organizational changes and technological advancements can render the previously intractable tractable. Or they can make things much more or less important. It's better to reference this framework regularly rather than applying it through an infrequent process.

Giving ITN a Shot

This is not one of those newsletters where I suggest you use a framework that I've relied on for years, I read about ITN for the first time this week. I do see it as a way to prompt more intentional decision making when it comes to how I spend my attention. Aside from trying to stick to what's important, I find myself drawn toward problems when I have strong opinions or when I feel like I have real expertise to offer. That's fun for me, but I'm not sure it's best for the organization as a whole. I'm eager to try a more disciplined approach.