When thirty priorities means none

If thirty projects all take priority over one another, the list has not made a decision.

It has a list of things nobody was willing to stop.

The distinction sounds obvious and is ignored constantly. Planning begins with an attempt to identify the most important work. Then every organization arrives with commitments, customers, technical debt, promises, and a convincing explanation for why its projects are different.

Most of those explanations are true.

That is what makes prioritization difficult. Companies rarely choose between one obviously valuable project and twenty-nine useless ones. They choose among many reasonable things that cannot all receive the same people, attention, and urgency.

The work of planning is supposed to be making that choice.

Instead, planning often becomes a negotiation to preserve as much local work as possible. Leaders argue for their teams. Projects are renamed to fit the company themes. Two priorities are combined under a heading broad enough to contain both. Nothing is killed; it is “sequenced,” “incubated,” or moved to a second tier that everybody understands will continue anyway.

The final roadmap looks comprehensive. It also looks almost exactly like the collection of roadmaps that entered the process.

I saw this pattern often in the part of Twitter where I worked. Planning and OKR season became predictably draining. Feedback from peers, partners, and people on my teams was remarkably consistent: this was the worst time of the year.

The problem was not that planning involved hard choices. The problem was that it consumed enormous energy while frequently avoiding them.

A leader could accept three company P0s, put them in their pocket, and then turn out empty pockets when asked to staff them: sorry, nothing left. Their existing projects somehow survived. The company priorities became somebody else's staffing problem.

A priority should change behavior.

It should affect staffing. It should give teams a basis for rejecting work. It should allow a leader to resolve a conflict without escalating through several layers. Most importantly, it should identify what the organization will not do.

Without those consequences, “priority” becomes an adjective leaders attach to requests.

This creates a strange operating environment. Everything is important, so deadlines become a substitute for deciding relative importance. Every project invents urgency. Teams depend on executive escalation because the plan cannot resolve conflicts. People learn that commitments are provisional because history tells them dates will move without much consequence.

Then leaders become frustrated that execution lacks conviction.

Conviction cannot be added after prioritization. It is produced by the choice.

There are legitimate reasons for a company to maintain a broad portfolio. Some work is mandatory. Some protects revenue while other work creates future growth. Some investments are cheap options worth preserving. A business is not required to bet everything on one project to prove it can focus.

But a portfolio still has an allocation. It still distinguishes between work that must happen, work that should happen, and work that survives only if capacity remains.

If every team is told its project is essential, the organization has delegated prioritization to whoever controls the scarcest dependency.

Stopping work is painful because work belongs to people.

A project may represent months of effort, a promotion case, a leader’s strategy, or a promise made to a customer. Saying it is not among the company’s most important work can feel like saying the people doing it are not important.

They are not the same statement, but leaders often avoid the first because they do not know how to prevent it from feeling like the second.

That avoidance is expensive. The project continues, but often without the staffing or executive attention needed for success. The team receives the emotional reassurance of being called important and the practical experience of being repeatedly delayed.

I do not think that is kinder than making the decision.

A useful planning process should leave some people disappointed and very few people confused. It should produce a short enough set of choices that people can use it without consulting the people who wrote it.

It should also make changes visible. Priorities can change. Markets move, assumptions fail, and emergencies happen. Pretending the original plan remains intact while quietly redirecting the company teaches everyone that planning is theater.

The measure of a priority list is not how well it represents everything the company values.

It is whether someone can use it to decide what not to do.