The development of communication technologies has changed the workflows in a revolutionary way.
Teams that had to wait for each other for gradually moving phases in production can now work in parallel with fast feedback. Team members who cannot come together physically can meet during online shifts. In fact, the work can be distributed all over the world ignoring geographical distances.
Processes that used to be carried out by emergency code telex, then faxes, relatively infrequent phone calls and e-mails that were checked and answered perhaps only once a day back then, are now turned into instant notifications and constant messages and gained a great momentum with screenshots.
We have all turned into a multitasking acrobats.
One of the inevitable consequences of this multi layering is the complicating the hierarchy of urgency.
Triaj, which means “to select, separate, sort out” in French, has taken its place in the terminology of the emergency services since the 1930’s: dividing the wounded ones on the battlefield into groups according to their vital risk. In today’s business world, it has become impossible to triage jobs, as everyone requests instant notifications with an emergency code.
When every task is labeled as urgent, urgency has stopped being a distinguishing feature and lost its meaning. Maybe the way to overcome this confusion is to hand over the “triage right” to the person who will do the work.
If there are no bleeding patients, perhaps the situation is not that urgent!
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