Immediate Action

One of the hardest parts of managing work is determining priority. It’s even more difficult if you stick with the original definition of priority as singular. For roughly the first 500 years of use, “priority” in the English language meant the one first thing that took precedence over all others. And then around the 1900s—and with the advent of industrial organizations and, later, knowledge work—the word evolved into its plural form: priorities.

The pluralization of “priority” into “priorities” creates a paradox. If everything is a priority, then nothing truly is. The word lost its significance.

Yet here we are, constantly listing, shifting, and managing priorities. We maintain endless backlogs and pretend it’s possible to sort a list of a hundred items into a defined order.

There is only one true priority in constant negotiation with the variables at play.

I had a plan of what to focus on each day this week. But building software used by thousands of people is a volatile situation. The work is always in motion. A productive day is a day of impactful work, which can come from planned work and unplanned work. Outcomes matter.

Just this week, a stakeholder reported a core feature wasn’t working, a key customer reported inconsistencies in tracking usage data, and a frustrated customer shared feedback.

In each of these instances, the default team response was deferral:

Broken feature? We’re at capacity this week. We’ll look at it next week.

Usage inconsistencies? That’s expected and due to a known limitation.

Frustrated customer? We can talk more about this in our next sync.

Deferred, deferred, deferred.

But we protected focus, right? We didn’t immediately stop what we were doing and shift our carefully and strategically crafted focus to the new and shiny priority.

That should be a win. But it’s a mirage.

The immediate deferral of action now creates compounded pain later.

• A broken feature in the product erodes trust with users. When you release a new feature, they aren’t there to use it, or they don’t trust it will work as expected.
• Inconsistent usage data erodes trust with customers. They can’t track how their team is adopting the tool and justify the continued investment.
• Ignoring customer feedback erodes trust in the product. They won’t stay when they aren’t heard, and they will find another product that is responsive to feedback.

In each of these examples, I chose action over deferral. I chose the smallest high-leverage action to take immediately for each problem. Yes, that required reevaluating my focus each time, but it’s the process. Your priority is your intention—your one intention. Everything else is a constantly shifting current of information. Your job is to find the signal in the noise.

This idea is called Immediate Action.

It lives in the 🐍 Clarity Current of the Claritorium:

• 🦉 Clarity Codex (Structure): The hidden structure of clarity. Models, language, and frameworks that guide intuition and decision-making.
• 🐍 Clarity Current (Motion): The invisible force of clarity. Roles, rhythms, and relationships that activate and sustain clarity.
• 🦎 Clarity Climate (Environment): The emergent environment of clarity. Behaviors, values, and patterns that make clarity natural, resilient, and scalable.

(You can read more about the Claritorium at claritorium.com.)

The three pillars of Immediate Action are:

1. Trust First: If deferral erodes trust, act now.
2. Clear Intention: Anchor focus in a single priority.
3. Active Adaptation: When the variables change, so should your priority.

Trust First

Trust is a compounding resource. Taking immediate action trades time now for time later.

When the feedback about the broken feature came in, I jumped in to fix it. The feature is core to the product, and it required fast action to build trust. If I deferred the pain, then more issues in the product could surface and compound as feature development continues. Software is complex, and debugging is most effective when limiting variables.

When sales and customer success shared the customer issue related to usage data, I met with them to gather context, talked to the product team, and developed an aligned response. If I deferred the pain, then our team wouldn’t have the right context to share with the customer, which would further erode trust and cause them to potentially stop using the product. And that would then requirer a deeper time investment from more people to reconcile the account.

When I came across repeated feedback from a longtime and frustrated customer, I gathered context from support and reached out to the user to schedule a call. If I deferred the pain, then the customer could churn. You might think that’s a small loss, but what happens when more users have the same feedback and don’t share it? They leave, too. And then you’re in a much bigger time deficit to reconcile those issues.

Begin with trust as the filter. And then take immediate action.

Clear Intention

When it comes to immediate action, the action you take should be weighed carefully. Take the smallest and most high-leverage action to move it forward. Think critically, move intentionally.

Here were my intentions for each of the issues I encountered:

• Fix the bug in the key feature.
• Meet with the team managing the customer.
• Reach out to the customer and offer times to meet.

But I also could have chose different intentions for the same issues:

• Check usage data and error reporting.
• Talk to the product team about the issue.
• Have customer support reach out and gather context.

They all generate movement, but in different ways. Use your judgement when setting your intention, but remember: Only set one intention and stay focused on it completely.

Active Adaptation

When Charles Darwin wrote the fifth addition of On the Origin of Species, he used the phrase “survival of the fittest” as a synonym for natural selection. The phrase, often misinterpreted as being about strength, indicates how adaptable an organism is to its environment.

Adaptability is strength.

I didn’t plan these issues. You can’t. That’s the nature of complex systems.

We’re building software (a complex system) within a company (another complex system) and for users (yet another complex system). In complex systems, variability creates unpredictability.

Despite the unknowns, I always start my day the same way:

• Review my calendar (and other inputs).
• Create a list of tasks (including meetings).
• Select the first focus and get to work on it.

But that doesn’t mean the plan is fixed. Both the planned work (the initial list) and the unplanned work (new information) live in harmony because change is expected. I create one clear intention, focus on it, and then adapt when new information comes in.

When the bug popped up, instead of pulling from my list, I created a new intention. I focused on figuring out the bug, focusing exclusively on that and ignoring (temporarily) the rest of my list. I could have stayed heads down on my planned tasks. But doing something purely because you planned on doing it is a recipe for missing the signals for immediate action—for building resilience.

Dynamic Priority

Immediate Action isn’t about throwing your goals out the window every time a new signal shows up. It’s about continually reconciling what’s emergent with what’s important. If you decide to pivot in the moment when trust is at stake, always reset back to your high-level goals to rebalance progress and move forward. Continual evaluation is the glue.

Moments of Immediate Action are opportunities to show what matters—to highlight the key principles you believe in as a team:

We pivoted to fix the bug because it protects trust with our customers. Maintaining a stable foundation in the product allows us to make this new feature release successful.

With that said, you should always design your team to handle this work without pulling time from planned work. One team on features, another on fixes and improvements. It’s a lot easier to shuffle priorities on bounded work built for adaptation. Feature work requires long, uninterrupted focus to make progress, resolve unknowns, and complete the work.

Find the one priority, stay adaptable, and build trust. Because trust builds resilience, resilience sustains momentum, and momentum changes everything.