Prioritising the Big Small Things for S.C.A.L.E.
by Eileen Wong
Last updated 20 July 2026
ETHOS Issue 25, April 2023
All organisations and teams face challenges in prioritisation. This is because workload gain, like weight gain, is insidious. It creeps up on us and is hard to get rid of. We rarely seek to add on more of it, but often find ourselves inundated nevertheless.
Our instinct when prioritising is to remove activities that take up time. But prioritising work is not about harnessing the willpower to say no to new things. Nor can we expect to start from a blank slate, like how Shopify cancelled meetings (some 322,000 hours’ worth) to free up time for staff members to get things done.1
Paradoxically, what we need instead is to spend time and energy deciding what we will do and what we will not do.
What Prioritisation Is: Focusing on the Big Small Things
Prioritisation happens daily, but this is not always tangible to us. The results of how well we prioritise show up as a lagging indicator. Every day, we make choices and incur trade-offs in how we spend our time, energy, and talents, which then also affects others in turn. What can help is to spend our limited time, energy, and talents on the big small things, i.e., the small actions that scale up to a big impact and results.
For example, a senior leader at a management meeting might make it a point to clarify how a new staff idea could contribute tangibly to the agency’s longer-term plans. What might begin as one simple question could prompt other leaders and officers to think more intentionally about the investment of resources for an idea to achieve the agency’s goals. This is what we mean by a “big small thing” that can make a difference in shifting the way teams or organisations think about their work.
What we need is to spend time and energy deciding what we will do and what we will not do.
Based on insights from the ILOD Transformation Team’s consultancy work with close to 40 public agencies, we have developed a S.C.A.L.E. Framework as a practical tool to help leaders and organisations prioritise more effectively by focusing on some big small things, along five key dimensions: Strategy, Culture, Alignment of processes, Leadership, and Empowerment.
STRATEGY
Clarity for Crafting and Translating into Results
The two questions you need to ask about your Strategy:
How is our work achieving what is core to our organisation?
How is our work reflecting what our organisation can uniquely do?
The most important step in prioritisation is to clarify the organisation’s strategy and to activate it in the work done, from the top all the way to the ground. In our consultancy work, we have heard varying degrees of clarity across different levels when officers are asked about their organisation’s focus. We often see organisations spending extensive effort in crafting strategic plans, but less effort in communicating and translating strategies into day-to-day work.
In an engagement session designed for 76 senior and middle management leaders of an agency, participants discussed how their teams contributed to the strategic pillars of their agency’s transformation. The senior management team had earlier developed the agency’s transformation vision and corresponding strategies. They wanted to take time to share with middle managers, so as to sharpen and translate the strategies for the work on the ground. Energy levels rose as different participants articulated a shared desired impact for their stakeholders and end users. Gathering the leaders for half a day was a big small thing—a small investment of effort that led to significant value in alignment. At the end of the session, participants echoed that the time was well spent, particularly with the middle managers articulating greater resonance with organisational strategies in planning and prioritising their work.
When leaders take time to help others understand the core work and unique value created by their organisation, teams and officers will have more clarity in prioritising time and energy for work that matters.
When leaders take time to help others understand the work and value created by their organisation, officers will have more clarity in prioritising time and work.
CULTURE
Behaviours and Norms We Want More Of
The two questions you need to ask about your Culture:
How is our culture recognising and rewarding our work outcomes?
How is our culture recognising and rewarding the collaboration needed for our work?
What gets rewarded gets done. An organisation’s culture is built and reinforced day by day through actual work behaviours and norms. Ask any newcomer to observe and share candidly what gets rewarded or frowned upon at the workplace. Their fresh perspectives—free from legacy experiences—offer an outside-in view of current work interactions.
This runs contrary to the call for prioritisation and reducing workload because we have been conditioned for success through adding and not subtracting.
We have been conditioned for success through adding and not subtracting.
In ILOD’s interactions with agencies, we have seen some leaders find ways to combat such learned behaviours to do more. One leader articulated clear expectations of what was needed for a work deliverable and told officers what ‘done’ work would look like, to reduce unnecessary rework. Another leader clarified with subordinates what good staffing looked like, to prevent overzealous preparations. One leader made the effort to email the entire division, openly lauding an officer who had put up a request to drop work that was no longer relevant.
A few words or a short email can make implicit expectations explicit. These big small things not only have a big impact on officers’ workload and priorities, but can also clarify and encourage the work behaviours and norms we want more of.
ALIGNMENT OF PROCESSES
Jolt for Optimisation
The two questions you need to ask about your Alignment of processes:
How have we optimised the layers of clearance and iterations needed for our work?
How have we optimised virtual and in-person ways of working?
Work processes can accumulate over time and be hard to get rid of. With the hybrid/flexible work arrangements of the pandemic years, processes may even have multiplied. At the same time, the constraints imposed by the pandemic have also taught us that we can in fact do quite well with less. For example, we learnt that virtual meetings can save on commuting time while not compromising work outcomes.
One big small thing we can do is to give ourselves an intentional jolt to see if our work processes are indeed adding value. During a leadership team conversation to address high workload, an agency head related his shock of discovering that over 20 iterations had been made to a set of meeting notes that the meeting chairperson did not even see. It could not be clearly determined if each layer added value. The high number of iterations prompted the leaders to discuss how they might have unknowingly contributed to similar inefficiencies. They decided to update the clearance process from a sequential flow to using a shared platform for concurrent clearance by the required parties.
Such a change was a relatively small step for them. But it was a big small thing that led to a shift in mindsets and expectations, prompting a broader relook and optimisation of how they had been working.
One big small thing we can do is to give ourselves an intentional jolt to see if our work processes are indeed adding value.
LEADERSHIP
Go Slow to Go Fast
The two questions you need to ask about your Leadership:
How are our leaders able to take time to prioritise and communicate directions?
How effective are our leaders in sensing ground needs?
Leaders these days have little time to think. In a poll with over 300 responses at ILOD’s sharing session on prioritisation, a top-ranked challenge was the scarcity of time and not being able to step back to think. Having to juggle ‘business-as-usual’ activities and new initiatives driven by various stakeholders was another key challenge.
Among the leaders we interacted with were a number of ‘positive deviants’—those who seemed to be able to cope and even thrive in this context. Their trade secret was common knowledge but not common practice: the importance of having white space to think and plan, while also taking time to get ground data to assess and adjust how well plans are working.
Common knowledge but not common practice: having white space to think and plan, while also taking time to get ground data to assess and adjust how well plans are working.
In a leadership team planning discussion to chart plans for the agency’s strategy, one division head revealed that he asked his staff to set aside time every week as ‘free time’ to pause and think. He related how he blocked off two hours every week to reflect on the past week. This helped him sharpen his priorities. He finished his sharing with an apologetic look at the agency head because he had self-declared the ‘free time’ for his staff without prior permission. To his credit, the agency head nodded his approval as the room of leaders cheered at the encouraging confession.
Pausing to ‘go slow to go fast’ illustrates how a big small thing can enable leaders to prioritise better.
EMPOWERMENT
Going beyond Shared Commitment to Shared Understanding
The two questions you need to ask about your Empowerment:
How are the right decisions made by the right people at the right level?
How are we facilitating the co-creation of ideas and solutions?
Involvement leads to commitment. This is a principle we often emphasise in our change consultancy work. Recall the ‘Ikea effect’, where you will likely assign a higher value to something you have assembled, even if the nails do not line up straight or the final product looks imperfect. When people are involved in making decisions or have a say in the eventual plans, they are more motivated to see things through to achieve the agreed outcomes.
This also means that leaders have the latitude to delegate formal authority, change informal norms and decision-making, and energise those in the levels below. This can be liberating for top leaders—freeing up time to keep track of what’s going on and prioritising well especially as the operating environment becomes increasingly complex. In other words, they can go slow to go fast.
In our consultancy work, we found that this empowerment can also go further to creating shared understanding. We have brought people together to share ‘what your world is like’ in various engagement sessions. In one cross-level discussion between senior leaders and middle managers, we created the space for them to share their respective conditions and challenges. At the start, the atmosphere in the room was tentative. Gradually, it became more uplifting as everyone took a small figurative step into one another’s worlds. By the end, there was a shared understanding of the different worlds of experiences in the group. All it took was a big small thing to come together to create shared understanding.
When people are involved in making decisions or have a say in the eventual plans, they are more motivated to see things through.
Scaling Made Versatile and Adaptable
The S.C.A.L.E. Framework is versatile. It can be used as a full framework to cover all five dimensions. Each dimension can also be used separately in deep dive discussions to surface issues and big small things for improvement.
The S.C.A.L.E. Framework is also adaptable. We have used the S.C.A.L.E. Framework and assessment tool in a bespoke workshop designed for a Ministry's senior leadership team. In their discussions, they applied the framework to assess the state of prioritisation at the whole organisation level—for diverse functions as well as at the cluster or divisional level for intact teams.
The Big Small Things Compounded to Keep Off the ‘Pounds’
Many of the examples from our consultancy experiences are small actions that build up into significant impact and results.
By improving day and day, instead of relying on willpower or wiping the slate clean, they are akin to making the 1% progress every day that recent studies on habits highlight as vital to long term behavioural change.
Small actions can compound to keep off the ‘pounds’ in our work and organisations. They sustain our efforts to achieve organisation-wide impact, ensuring that our prioritisation can S.C.A.L.E.
ILOD’s Transformation Team can help your agency realise its strategy, sustain performance, and build a healthier organisation. It offers consultancy support for:
Organisation transformation and change management
Organisation development and employee engagement
Leadership team alignment and development
Hybrid work design
To find out more, connect with Eileen at: eileen_wong@cscollege.gov.sg
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eileen Wong is Principal Consultant at the Institute of Leadership and Organisation Development, Civil Service College. She leads the ILOD Transformation Team to provide consultancy services to help agencies and senior leaders build and transform their organisations to thrive. Her consultancy scope includes organisation transformation and change, organisation development, leadership team development, employee engagement and hybrid work design.
NOTE
Andrea Hsu and Stacey Vanek Smith, “Shopify Deleted 322,000 Hours of Meetings. Should the Rest of Us Be Jealous?”, February 15, 2023, accessed February 27, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1156804295/shopify-delete-meetings-zoom-virtual-productivity.