Jonathan Poisner Strategic Consulting

About a decade ago, I posted a blog that suggested how to apply a matrix approach in organizational decision-making.

The blog examined a time-management technique originally generated by Stephen Covey in his seminal book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  The technique involved assigning all tasks into one of four quadrants based on two axes.  The vertical axis was “important” versus “unimportant.”  The horizontal access was urgent (from a time perspective) and non-urgent. 

Here’s what the matrix looked like as I adapted it from Covey’s Seven Habits (page 151).

The obvious solution applied to organizations (and individuals) is to do away with everything you can that is both unimportant and non-urgent.  That requires discipline. 

The big aha moment (at least for me) was the necessity of addressing the upper righthand quadrant by forcing yourself to spend time addressing items that are important, but where there is never time urgency. 

This tool can be useful for both individuals in how they manage their own time and organizations in how they prioritize staff and board time.   

I recently came across two similar quadrant approaches that are also useful both for individuals and organizations when it comes to making decisions about where to focus time (including what programs/strategies to take on). 

Technique one: The Impact-Effort Matrix.

Technique two: The Impact-Achievability Matrix.

Let’s take them one at a time.

The Impact-Effort Matrix

The Impact-Effort Matrix, like Covey’s time management matrix, has a vertical access of Important versus unimportant (although the term impact is used as a substitute for importance).  The horizontal impact focuses on the level of effort needed to achieve the outcome (a lot of effort versus not much effort).

Of course, in the nonprofit context, “effort” often equates to dollars.  If something requires more effort, that usually equates to time, and money can buy more time (staff-time, contractor time, etc.).

This is what the Impact-Effort Matrix looks like:

Like with the importance-urgency matrix, one quadrant (the lower right) is easy to dismiss: stop doing things that have little impact, but require a lot of effort.  Often times these are things you’re doing because “that’s what we’ve always done.”  Maybe the activity once had a high impact.  Or maybe changes in the landscape have made the activity take far more effort than previously.

It’s also pretty straightforward to prioritize time towards activities that are in the upper left quadrant (high impact, low effort).  This should be the focus of brainstorms about new things your organization may wish to take on.  What are the things that will have the biggest impact for the level of effort required?

What about the other two quadrants? 

• High Impact/High Effort (the upper right) – Clearly you need to do some in this quadrant because the high impact may justify the level of effort.  These may be activities your supporters care about and want to see done.  For these activities, the primary question I’d ask is: can we accomplish the same result with less effort if we change how we approach the program/strategy? 
  
  
• Low Impact/Low Effort (the lower left) – Think about whether there are secondary ways where you can create impact beyond the primary reason (e.g. impact you’re trying to create) from doing the activity/strategy.  Are there ways to generate excess funding from the activity?  Or some communications/branding benefit? 

In a nutshell:

The Impact-Achievability Matrix

This is very loosely related to Impact-Effort matrix, since what’s achievable can depend on the level of effort applied. 

Nonetheless, I find “achievability” a more useful term than “effort” when evaluating situations where the level of effort is not the major determinant on whether something is achievable. 

This is often the case in advocacy/lobbying context where many of my clients do their work.  

Again, the easy advice is: do more things that are high impact, easy to achieve (upper right quadrant).

Likewise, it’s also easy to advise nonprofits to stop doing things that are low impact and difficult to achieve (lower left quadrant).

For the low impact, high achievability (lower right quadrant), doing some of this activity/strategy is worthwhile as an insurance to be able to have some “wins” or “success stories” you can point to, even if they are low impact.  But if that’s all you ever do, you’re probably not advancing your mission to a significant degree.

For the high impact, low achievability (upper left quadrant), you sometimes do need to roll the dice and take chances to make a big impact, even if success is less likely.  The question I’d ask is: are we designing the work so that we’re building organizational capacity so that even if we “lose” or “fail to achieve” what we set out to, we’re nonetheless positioning ourselves to win future “fights” or make success more achievable further down the road.  Will we come out of the activity with more volunteers, more donors, new skills, a better brand, etc.?  And are we designing the work to maximize the odds we’ll gain these ancillary benefits?

In a nutshell:

So when do you use these tools?  And do you use them in combination?

I’ve used these tools one at a time, rather than creating some more complicated scheme.  I’d be curious to hear if anybody has had success creating some 3-D matrix that pulls from multiple of these tools. 

If you’ve never used these tools, I’d pick the matrix that seems most relevant to your organization and try it out as a decision-making tool.  This could be as part of strategic planning, annual organizational work planning, or just as a tool used by an individual to focus their own time.

Of course, all three matrixes are worthless if the organization tends to misevaluate what’s important!  Or what will make the biggest impact!    

How to evaluate what’s important/impactful will be a focus of a future article.