Photo by Roco Julie via Flickr

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

The sic executives at the IQ reducing, productivity destroying and ridiculously over-valued media company BuzzFeed have tapped into a universal human weakness – we love lists. Lists by their very nature reduce one of the cognitive qualities which sets us humans apart – the ability to create categories. This is not to say that lists don’t have purpose or can’t create value. Indeed, physician and public intellectual Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right documents eloquently how, in the case of applying known and tested best practices to fully understood problems, lists can save lives. The issue here is the nuance – fully understood problems. We are living in an age where the problems we face are not fully understood. In a list featuring the “Best Quotes of 2014”, I came across this gem: “The most important thing is to make the most important thing, the most important thing.” Leadership thus becomes a three part journey:

• A] Figure out what the most important thing is;
• B] Craft messaging which convinces others to concur that your important thing is indeed the most important thing; and
• C] Understand what to do about the most important thing

Year-End and Year-Beginning drive the chattering classes into a frenzy of list making. A recent search on Twitter produced the following lists:

• “The year's best crime fiction”
• “Top 10 Creative Leadership Books Of 2014”
• “Bill Gates’ 5 favorite books of 2014”
• “20 best reissues of 2014”
• “Top Google searches for 2014”
• “The top Cuban prospects”
• “List of best of top ten science lists, 2014. Part I”

One also discovered lists of why people shouldn’t make lists and the “Top 14 reasons why you shouldn't bother clicking on any top xx lists.”

In his opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbons opined:

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. [Volume I, Chapter 3].

Gibbons continues and argues that this sequence of Five Good Emperors [Machiavelli’s label for the period 96-180 AD] is “possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”

I believe that the greatest time is the present time and the most important list we have to create – rather than consume as 2014 draws to a close – is the list of important things we have to develop a deep enough understanding to craft compelling messages that lead/enable effective action.