How often do you use an effort-impact matrix to help decide which solutions to put in place? Quite often? That’s what I thought. Using a prioritization tool is pretty common. Ideas or solutions that seem easy to put in place and have a ‘big’ impact are the ones normally chosen. Solutions that seem harder to implement – or out of our control – are often put to the side because they could be ‘too difficult’. There are a couple of problems with this though. First of all, just because we think something might be difficult or require a lot of effort, does it mean we shouldn’t do it? Think how many inventions we’d be living without if people had simply not even tried because whatever it was that they were trying to achieve seemed ‘too difficult’! Which brings us to the even more important reason to work on difficult things. And that is that once we stop assuming – and telling ourselves – that something is too difficult to tackle, and simply start working on it, in general, we find that we can make progress. And soon, something that once seemed difficult and impossible is done! When we work on ‘difficult things’ we learn and grow and gain confidence…so that we can take on even more difficult things! That’s good for our customers, our company and for us!
