There is a sentence that shows up constantly in organizations: “We have a lot of priorities right now.” And usually, that's a contradiction.
If everything is a priority, nothing has actually been prioritized.
The problem isn't knowing what matters
Imagine you've spent time investigating a problem. You talked to the people involved. You looked at the process. You identified several things that could improve:
The instructions need to be clearer.
Managers need better training.
The handoff between two teams needs redesigning.
The documentation is outdated.
Employees need more opportunities to practice.
Leadership needs better information about what's happening.
All six things might be true. But knowing what matters isn't the same as deciding what matters now. That requires prioritization.
Prioritization is compression
A complex situation contains more possible actions than you have time, money, attention, or people to pursue. So someone has to reduce: turn many legitimate demands into a small number of commitments.
That's a form of compression. But good compression doesn't simply remove information. It preserves the relationships that matter. If inconsistent instructions from managers are causing employees to make different decisions, rewriting the employee handbook might be useful eventually.
But it probably isn't the first priority. The more consequential relationship is between manager interpretation and employee direction and employee action.
That tells us where to intervene first.
A priority has consequences
This is where prioritization becomes uncomfortable. Calling something a priority means allowing something else to wait.
If I say: “Our priority this month is making sure managers interpret the new procedure consistently.” then I am also saying “Updating the rest of the documentation can wait.”
That's a decision.
And decisions consume resources. Time goes somewhere.mMoney goes somewhere. Attention goes somewhere. People work on one thing instead of another. Priorities become real when they change what receives resources.
When knowing more makes action worse
This also reveals an interesting knowledge problem. Sometimes investigation gives us more knowledge: six problems, twelve recommendations, twenty possible improvements.
The additional knowledge might be accurate. But if it leaves everyone trying to respond to everything simultaneously, knowing more has made coordinated action harder.
The job isn't always to provide more information. Sometimes the job is to compress what we know into a decision:
Given what we know, what deserves our attention first?
A simple priority test
When several things matter, I have started thinking about four questions:
What outcome matters most right now?
What is preventing that outcome?
Which intervention would change the most important relationship in the system?
What are we willing to let wait?
That last question forces a priority to become a choice rather than a list.
Try it
Think about something you're responsible for right now. Maybe it's a project. A course. A team. A business. Your own work. Write down everything that currently feels important.
Then ask:
If I could improve only one of these things over the next 30 days, which improvement would make the other work easier or less necessary?
Choose one.
Then identify what you're deliberately not prioritizing. That's part of the decision too. Because effective action doesn't require us to know or pursue everything. It requires us to recognize what matters for the outcome we're trying to produce now.
Next time, I'll take this one step further. Once you've decided what matters, another question appears: Who should own it?
— Greg K. Campbell