How to prioritize team issues

The next time your team is overwhelmed with too many problems and issues, here’s a process you can use to get clarity on priorities, from Gino Wickman’s Get a Grip.

It’s called the Keep, Kill, Combine process.

Have the team list out all the priorities and issues. Do a big collective brain dump and write out a list on a whiteboard or shared doc.

Then ask of each item:

Should we keep it? (meaning it has to be dealt with now).

Should we kill it? (because it’s not vital), or

Should we combine it with a related or dependent issue?

Then go through the refined list again, taking as many passes as needed to get your list manageable.

If you want, have a parking lot for items that you killed because they don’t need to be addressed immediately but do have to be dealt with in the future.