Reflections

Too many priorities: less a planning problem, more a question of courage

18 August 2026

Why organisations end up with too many priorities — and what it takes to change that.

Picture a leadership team at the end of a planning session. The whiteboard is full. There are eleven strategic priorities for the year, each with an owner, a timeline, and a set of key results. Everyone leaves the room feeling productive. Six months later, most of those priorities are still in progress, and not much has changed.

This is not a rare scenario. It is, in many organisations, the norm.

How does it happen?

Certainly not through carelessness. Most leadership teams are thoughtful, well-intentioned, and genuinely want to move things forward. In my experience, the problem is structural and human.

When a group of leaders comes together to agree on priorities, each person arrives with things that matter to them. Sales has its imperatives. Operations has its constraints. Finance has its concerns. And because these are all legitimate, and because the people raising them deserve to be heard, the list grows. Things are added. Almost nothing is removed.

The list rarely grows because of bad process. It grows because no one in the room has yet been willing to say that something already on it should not be.

Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management and one of the world's leading thinkers on strategy, argues that real strategy is defined by what an organisation chooses not to do as much as by what it chooses to do. A plan that accommodates every competing interest is not a strategy — it is a compromise. And yet compromises are what most planning processes produce, because genuine strategic choice requires someone to say, out loud, that one thing matters more than another. That is a harder conversation than adding a row to a spreadsheet.

Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the father of modern management, wrote in the Harvard Business Review as early as 1963 that there is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Decades later, the insight remains as relevant as ever.

What does it actually cost?

More than most people realise.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist whose research transformed our understanding of how people think and decide, showed that when people are pulled in multiple directions simultaneously, decision quality drops. The brain under pressure defaults to faster, more reactive thinking, which means that the very situations that demand careful judgment are the ones where judgment is most compromised.

Eliyahu Goldratt, the physicist and business thinker whose Theory of Constraints transformed operations management, identified the same pattern at a systems level. Every system has one constraint, one bottleneck, that limits overall performance. The right response is to find it, focus on it, and — crucially — accept that everything else comes second. When organisations treat every priority as equally urgent, they do the opposite: they distribute attention and resources so thinly that nothing gets enough. Goldratt described this as "bad multitasking" — a condition in which everyone is busy, everything is moving, and nothing is finishing. That last part is where most organisations struggle: subordinating everything else means accepting that some things will receive less attention than they deserve. That is not a comfortable agreement to reach in a room full of people who each care deeply about their work.

Gallup's ongoing research into employee engagement adds a human dimension: as of 2025, only around half of employees worldwide strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work. When priorities are unclear at the top, that confusion travels downward, and it compounds.

What does real prioritisation look like?

Jim Collins, the researcher and author best known for his study of what distinguishes enduring great companies from their peers, found that the organisations that outperformed over the long term were defined as much by what they stopped doing as by what they started. He proposed the Stop Doing List as a discipline: as a regular practice, not a one-off exercise.

Patrick Lencioni, an organisational consultant and author who has spent decades studying why some leadership teams function well and others don't, describes what he calls the Thematic Goal: one rallying priority for a defined period, clearly named, understood by everyone, and used to resolve conflicts when they arise. When two things compete for time and resource, the Thematic Goal settles it. Without one, those conflicts get escalated, deferred, or quietly avoided.

The human question

This is, in the end, less about tools and techniques than about what happens between people in a room.

Lencioni illustrates this with a pattern he observed repeatedly in his work with leadership teams. Each member arrives at the table representing their function — their department, their people, their agenda. This is natural and understandable. But it creates a subtle problem: the leader's primary loyalty is to their team, not to the organisation as a whole. When a decision requires one function to sacrifice for the good of the whole, that sacrifice rarely comes easily. Everyone agrees in principle. In practice, each person protects their piece of the board. The result is a leadership team that, despite its talent and good intentions, cannot make the hard choices that real prioritisation requires.

Lencioni's remedy is deceptively simple: the leadership team must agree that their first loyalty is to the group sitting around the table, not to the function they represent. That shift means that when a priority decision is made, it is made in the interest of the whole, not in the interest of whoever argued loudest.

Part of what makes this so difficult is that adding a priority feels like generosity — acknowledging someone's work, keeping options open, not closing off possibilities prematurely. Removing one can feel like a verdict. And in organisations where seniority is partly measured by the size of one's agenda, prioritisation can feel like a loss of standing. These are not irrational fears. They are just rarely named.

Real prioritisation requires someone to hold a line. To say: right now, this matters more than that. And to hold that line when the pressure comes — as it always does — to add one more thing.

Brené Brown, a research professor whose work on courage and vulnerability has shaped how many organisations approach leadership, describes a pattern she calls "a lack of rumble" — the avoidance of direct, uncomfortable conversations. When prioritisation feels unkind, leaders soften it into ambiguity. But as Brown argues: clear is kind. Clarity, even when it disappoints, is more respectful than leaving people in deliberate vagueness about what actually matters.

That is not always easy. It can feel like letting people down. It can feel like closing off possibilities before they have been fully explored. It requires something no framework supplies: the willingness to choose, and to mean it.

If you are reading this as a leader

Two things you can do this week — both of them already implied by the thinking above.

First, look at your current priority list and count. If more than three things are genuinely competing for your team's full attention right now, you may well have too many. Apply Goldratt's question: which one, if it moved in the next ninety days, would make the most difference to everything else? Not the most urgent. The most consequential. Write it down, and share it with your team.

Second, at your next leadership meeting, try Drucker's discipline. Ask: what are we doing right now that we would not choose to start if we were starting fresh? Identify one thing. Stop it — or at the very least, give it no new resource until the first priority is further along.

These are not big interventions. But they are honest ones. And they signal something important to the people around you: that prioritisation is not a planning exercise. It is a practice.

The organisations that do this well are not necessarily smarter or better resourced than the ones that don't. They have simply found a way to have an honest conversation about what matters most, and to keep having it, even when it is uncomfortable.

That conversation is available to any team, at any time. It does not require a new system or a new process. It requires a little (or sometimes a lot) of courage and someone willing to go first.

What does your organisation's priority list look like right now? And when did you last take something off it?

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