Prioritization: The Forgotten Discipline and Skill – What I’ve Seen Work and Fail

The biggest challenge I’ve seen isn’t typically a “loudest voice” or a political power play — those happen occasionally, but they’re not at all the main issue. The real, persistent challenge is that goals are often set mechanistically for every organisational unit — and even for individuals — without a tight link or understanding to the actual capacity of the people or teams that must deliver across multiple units.

When you match this real capacity against all the priorities coming from different parts of the organisation, you quickly discover there’s no single authority (~below CEO) — and often no agreed process — to prioritise those competing needs for the good of the whole company.

For a somewhat long time, I assumed that creating a single, best-possible priority list would naturally be in everyone’s interest and thus balance these competing needs. I thought we could simply put everything important into one ranked list and get on with delivery. But standing in the middle of real transformation work taught me how quickly that list can turn into a logjam.

When this overload happens:
- Trade-offs are avoided because nobody wants to admit their goal might be delayed.
- Teams face constant context-switching, which slows everything down.
- Prioritization becomes meaningless — everything is urgent, but nothing moves fast.
- Constant over-demand erodes faith in the ongoing transformation (“Well, nothing really changed”).

One of the most effective ways I’ve seen to break this deadlock is to use structured decision-making, such as WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First). The power of WSJF isn’t in the numbers themselves — it’s in how it changes the conversation and in who is invited to it.

WSJF works because it:
- Forces us to look at one dimension at a time (business value, time criticality, risk reduction/opportunity enablement, job size).
- Compares relative value instead of debating absolute importance.
- Brings together representatives from as many business areas and functions as possible, ensuring that priorities are evaluated from multiple perspectives.
- Turns “my goal versus your goal” into “let’s look together at which combination gives us the most impact now.”

In this way, it works much like Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats method: instead of mixing all perspectives at once, the group moves step by step, focusing on one lens at a time. This makes discussions calmer, more constructive, and less personal — and often leads to decisions everyone can support, even when their own item doesn’t come first.

Here’s the paradox: most people in organisations already know about these prioritisation tools. But using them is often optional, because there’s a widespread belief that “we already know what’s important.” On top of that, prioritisation rarely follows a fixed cadence — it’s assumed to happen “at some point,” somewhere in the process. The result is that prioritisation becomes something vague, informal, and easily overridden by day-to-day pressures.

In the more successful transformations I’ve been part of, structured, inclusive prioritisation conversations were held regularly, with capacity visible to everyone (“This has typically been our throughput”), and leadership strongly supported the outcomes. This didn’t remove tough trade-offs — it made them explicit, and it made them together.

Prioritisation is not about getting your item to the top of the list. It’s about collectively deciding what the system will actually deliver now, and what will wait — and sticking to those decisions.

And here’s the critical link to transformation: if, planning cycle after planning cycle, teams are overloaded despite their proven throughput and the feedback they give, the whole process becomes demotivating. When that happens, belief in the transformation erodes — and with it, the willingness to engage in the very changes needed to make it succeed.

Done well, prioritisation builds clarity, trust, and the credibility of the change itself. Done poorly, it quietly sets the stage for delay, frustration, and a loss of faith in the journey.