How to Evaluate New Opportunities

New ideas and opportunities come along all the time. Resist the urge to jump on the next new thing. Rely on your prioritization process to assess all new ideas. Remember, if you add something new to your list, you either need to add resources to work on it or you have to stop working on something else, or finish something that’s a higher priority before you start working on the new task. Failure to do this leads to the inevitable burnout of your team.

In high growth organizations, periods of hyper growth can be really dangerous. During that time, everything’s interesting and exciting. The team has the energy to pursue a lot of ideas. But eventually, they run out of steam. Initiatives fail. Morale drops and performance suffers. Maintain a rigorous approach to drawing the line, and only pursue initiatives when you have the resources available to pursue them properly.

What I mean by drawing the line is, think of your initiative list. Start at the top of the list with your highest priority initiatives and then list every single idea and project you’re working on. Then, once you have that complete list, figure out what resources you have available to do the work. That may be people, time, or money.

Start at the top of your list and work your way down that list, figuring out how many resources that project is going to consume. When you run out of resources, draw a line on your prioritization list. Don’t work on anything below that line until you have additional resources or you finish a project above the line.

Enforce the discipline of assessing all new initiatives through your strategic filters. The filters let you know how closely aligned an idea is with your overall strategy. When you find something that’s off-strategy, there’s a rationale for saying no to it and staying focused on the most important ideas.