“If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority”
It’s a saying we all know to be true, yet routinely ignore.
So often I hear clients say that their teams are pushing on too many fronts, adding to the to-do list faster than they cross off. They have a “clear” (i.e. written down) organisational strategy but a limited sense of what it means in practice. What is most important? What by implication is not as important? What should they do if the demands of “strategic pillar” number four come into conflict with the demands of “strategic enabler” number three? For most organisations, meaningful prioritisation is a perennial struggle.
What makes prioritisation so difficult?
There are several factors that make organisational prioritisation a particularly gnarly challenge. Here are just a few of them:
The constraints aren’t easy to measure
Effective prioritisation requires you to have a clear view of the constraint i.e. the thing that’s driving the need to prioritise in the first place. If you’re an individual seeking to prioritise your own time, then a basic starting point is the number of hours in a day. Organisational capacity is an entirely different beast – it’s hard to quantify, and it isn’t static. There might be enough collective hours in the day – or the ability to bring in additional headcount to get more done – but what about leadership bandwidth? Some teams might feel they have what they need to deliver on their functional priorities but what happens when all teams need to draw on the same (finite) shared services? Getting a handle of what limitations you’re trying to prioritise within is no mean feat.
We don’t truly believe we need to do it
As humans, we have a bias toward optimism – overestimating the likelihood of positive events and underestimating the likelihood of negative ones. At work, this can manifest in what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called the ‘planning fallacy’ – a tendency to consistently underestimate how long something will take. How many of us get to the end of the day and look at an incomplete to-do list?
When it comes to organisational prioritisation, such a bias can set us up to fail. We think we can do more than we can, and therefore don’t believe there are trade-offs to be made. We don’t make a conscious choice between initiative A or initiative B – actively determining which one we think is most important – because we (often wrongly) believe we can do both.
It’s not always clear what ‘being a priority’ actually means
The word ‘priority’ comes from ‘prior’, meaning ‘first’. This makes sense; if something is a priority, we often describe it as ‘coming first’. But dig a little deeper and things become murkier. If something is a priority, does that mean we should dedicate all our time to it? Or is it more of a 55:45 thing? If something is not a priority, are we happy to make no progress on it whatsoever? Or does it just come in second if there are direct head-to-heads with things further up the list?
There’s no single answer to this, but all too often prioritisation is undertaken without alignment on the stakes. People may come out of the process with a shared understanding of the ranked priorities, but not a shared understanding of what that means for their day-to-day focus.
We don’t want to leave people out
Ruthless prioritisation can feel, well, pretty ruthless. Communicating to your organisation that you’re focusing on three things – not fifty – runs the risk of alienating those who don’t see how their role fits in. If new customer acquisition is a big priority, that might speak immediately to the sales teams but what about those working in compliance?
We may like the idea of everyone being like the famous NASA janitor, who proudly described himself as “helping to put a man on the moon”, but too often our desire to recognise contributions more directly means we create a laundry-list of priorities that captures all things equally. It may feel more inclusive, but is it really useful?
What can help?
Given the complexities of organisational prioritisation, it’ll come as no surprise that there’s no quick fix. There are, however, a few things that can help:
Identify the limiting factors
Ask yourself this question: if we’ve taken on too much, where will we feel it first? It might be in the availability of an individual leader or the limited resources of a specific team. Some of the constraints may be movable, but some won’t be. And those are the ones that frame your priorities.
Get real
If you think you’re about to take on too much, you’re definitely about to take on too much. We may not be able to ‘fix’ our optimism bias, but we can be conscious of it. Having a small number of priorities and a sense of what the ‘nice to haves’ would be in the unlikely event that you get to the finish line sooner than you thought will have greater impact than incremental progress across a long list.
Align on what ‘done’ looks like
Clarify what delivering on a priority will mean in practice. If your biggest priority is profitability, what goal would you need to achieve before you’d consider focusing on other things? Every priority might not be a ‘once and done’ initiative, but knowing what specifically you’re striving for in the short-medium term stops a priority becoming a meaningless ever-present, or a front you continue to push on past the point of diminishing returns.
Set a time horizon and consciously check-in
We tend to associate the phrase ‘changing priorities’ with chaos or a lack of commitment. It conveys a sense of goalposts quietly moving, and teams being pulled in multiple directions. But priorities shouldn’t be static – they should evolve in line with the progress of your organisation and the context in which it operates.
Fully committing to a set of priorities for a given time-period (be it six months, a year, two years), and then checking in on what may (or may not) have changed can de-risk your decision-making. If something isn’t on the list now, it might get there in due course. If something is there now, then you can make concerted progress and see where it leaves you.
Prioritisation – and by implication the decision to not start, or actively stop,certain activity – isn’t easy. We like to think we can have it all. But being deliberate and explicit about what you will and won’t focus on as an organisation means that – ironically – over time you can achieve more, not less.
