An interesting set of tasks and overlapping deadlines leads one often to face the situation of making a decision. In teams, this is often done through collective discussions and decision-making, and prioritisation. Sometimes, work overloads and deadlines take precedence over other important tasks.
A recent example was felt by the our editorial team which had a media partnership with another organisation that was conducting a national conference and exhibition. This partnership would have helped the team to get more knowledge, and more importantly, more content for an upcoming issue planned on the topic of Different Abilities and use of ICTs and other technologies.
However, an unwise management decision percolated down, that would neither have been challenged, not discussed, since there was no scope for doing so. Communication from management was one-sided, almost a conditional order for participation. The decision was also unwise since the loss would not only be of the team, but of the entire institution. This was, however, neither understood by the management, not discussed in detail. It did cause a lot of disgruntlement, and bad feeling among the team members, but one was actually helpless, since the magazine deadline was put as the priority.
If a collective meeting had been held, probably, work-flow could have been replanned, and the teams could have proceeded to divide the work among the team members to achieve both the tasks. Silly and unwise decisions, often have a high opportunity cost. And, we paid it this time. Hopefully, the management will see value in knowledge-sharing and not stick to knowledge-management.
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