Prioritising: should requests be assessed together or separately?
Requests for time generally arrive separately, even though they often draw on the same resources. The management question is specific: does examining these requests side by side change the priority they receive?
What the literature establishes
Christopher K. Hsee (1996, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) demonstrates experimentally that preferences can reverse depending on whether options are evaluated separately or jointly. His explanation concerns the evaluability of attributes: a characteristic that is difficult to assess in isolation can carry more weight when a reference point becomes available. The assessment format is therefore not necessarily a neutral setting for a decision.
What comparison makes easier to evaluate
Christopher K. Hsee, George F. Loewenstein, Sally Blount and Max H. Bazerman (1999, Psychological Bulletin) provide a theoretical review of preference reversals between separate and joint evaluations. They examine, in particular, how the opportunity to compare changes the weight given to characteristics that are difficult to assess on their own. For time allocation, this suggests a hypothesis rather than a directly established finding: the benefit of an intervention may be overlooked without a reference point, then become decisive when set against another request.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that all requests should always be brought together before a decision is made. These studies do not, however, demonstrate that joint evaluation consistently produces better decisions: making a difference more visible does not prove that it deserves greater weight. Comparing two interventions may clarify their relative value, but it may also draw attention to a difference that is easy to quantify and largely irrelevant. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of current practice
These articles concern the evaluation of options, not scheduling trials in Neuchâtel’s precision industries. They establish neither productivity gains nor reductions in delays following the introduction of joint assessment of requests. In practice, comparisons remain fragile if the proposals do not describe the same elements, or if safety, quality and delivery constraints are treated as mere preferences.
A practical check in Neuchâtel
In a Neuchâtel company working in microtechnology, watchmaking or precision microelectronics, SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme can provide a framework for testing real requests that require the same scarce expertise. Excluding non-negotiable obligations, each manager first assigns priority scores to requests presented separately, then ranks them side by side, using the same information about effort, expected benefit and the consequences of postponement. The measure is the proportion of pairs whose order reverses between the two assessments, among those with distinct initial scores; each reversal must be accompanied by the criterion that prompted it. This test does not prove that the second ranking is better, but it makes the sensitivity of the decision to the comparison format verifiable. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Neuchâtel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Neuchâtel
- time management & prioritisation
- Neuchâtel
- research
- training neuchâtel