It’s Monday morning. Marketing needs to bring the campaign forward, sales has promised a feature to the biggest client, IT has an update that can’t wait any longer. Three requests, three excellent reasons. The team, generous as ever, reshuffles the plan and “makes room”.
Too bad room doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Capacity is the same as last Friday. Commitments aren’t.
The choice gets made anyway
When no one explicitly decides what can wait, a choice is made all the same. Only it’s made by insistence, by access to the right people, by the loudest voice in the meeting. At that point the plan no longer guides the work: it just records decisions already taken elsewhere, in corridors or in chats.
And the people on the team know it very well. They see it every time a task that was “absolutely top priority” last week quietly slides to the bottom of the list, without anyone saying so.
Why deciding is so hard
Saying “this first” also means saying “that later”. And “later” always has an owner, who won’t be happy.
Whoever brings a request almost always has a legitimate goal. The point is that they often don’t see — and don’t have to answer for — what their change of priority costs other functions. It isn’t ill will: it’s a matter of visibility and accountability.
If everything is urgent, nothing is a priority. And if no one decides what can wait, pressure decides.
A small investigation
Before designing processes or buying new tools, I always start with something simple: reconstructing the latest changes of priority.
- Who asked for them?
- Who approved them (if anyone did)?
- Which activities slipped as a result?
- Who was told, and when?
Three or four cases are enough to see what’s really missing: shared evaluation criteria, a place to decide, or an agreement on who has the final say.
And real emergencies?
They exist, of course. An incident, an external deadline, an opportunity with a window of a few days. No one wants a process so rigid it prevents you from reacting.
But precisely in real emergencies it’s worth stopping for thirty seconds to ask: what are we putting on hold? Who needs to know? By what criterion are we accepting this change?
Because a well-handled emergency can be recognised by one detail: the next day, everyone knows what changed. Even those who had to wait.
The situations described are illustrative and do not refer to any single client.