Almost every strategic plan, once it’s actually put into words, contains a list of priorities that runs longer than the word “priority” can honestly support—five, seven, sometimes a dozen initiatives, each described as critical, each assigned real resources, each presented to the organization as a top focus for the year. This is worth examining closely, because a list of many top priorities isn’t really a set of priorities at all. It’s a list of things that haven’t yet been prioritized, dressed in language that makes the absence of a real choice look like a decision.
The word “priority” only means something in relation to what it’s ranked above. A single priority is a claim—this matters more than the alternatives, and when they conflict, this wins. A list of ten priorities makes no such claim about any of them, because when two items on that list inevitably compete for the same scarce resource—the same budget, the same executive attention, the same team’s finite capacity—the list itself provides no answer for which one actually takes precedence. That answer gets made anyway, in the moment, under pressure, usually by whoever is loudest or whoever’s need is most immediate, rather than by the deliberate judgment that a real prioritization exercise was supposed to produce in advance.
Where the Cost Shows Up
This matters because the cost of an unranked list doesn’t show up when the plan is announced. It shows up months later, in a resourcing conflict that has to be resolved on the fly, without the benefit of the calm, considered thinking that was available when the plan was originally built. A team lead forced to choose, mid-quarter, between two initiatives both officially designated as top priorities is making a real trade-off with real consequences, using judgment formed under time pressure rather than the leadership’s actual, deliberate view of what matters most—a view that was never actually articulated, because articulating it honestly would have required admitting that not everything on the list could be first.
Why Leaders Avoid Ranking
The reluctance to rank priorities explicitly is usually not a failure of clarity so much as an avoidance of a specific discomfort: naming a real order of priorities means naming what falls behind, and every item that falls behind has a stakeholder, a sponsor, or a team who will notice and may not like it. Calling everything a top priority avoids that discomfort in the short term, at the cost of making the eventual trade-off someone else’s problem, later, under worse conditions, without the benefit of having been decided deliberately by the person with the actual authority and full context to make the call well.
Force a real rank order—not a tier system that recreates the same problem.
Rank Honestly. Communicate the Order.
The corrective is a genuinely uncomfortable exercise, and its discomfort is exactly the point: force a real rank order, not a tier system that just recreates the same problem with extra steps, but an actual sequence—if only one of these could get done this year, which one, and if a second, which, continuing until the genuinely lower-value items are visibly, explicitly lower on the list. This exercise reveals something a flat list of “top priorities” never will: which initiatives the organization actually believes matter most, versus which ones simply made it onto the list because saying no to including them felt too costly in the room where the list was built.
Doing this well also requires communicating the rank honestly to the people whose work sits lower on it, which is the part leaders most often avoid, and exactly the part that makes the exercise worth doing. Telling a team their initiative is genuinely fourth on the list, not first, is uncomfortable—and it’s considerably more useful to that team than leaving them believing they’re a top priority right up until a resourcing decision quietly proves otherwise, at which point the team correctly concludes the earlier language wasn’t honest, which costs more trust than the original discomfort would have.
None of this means an organization can only ever have one thing going on—multiple genuine priorities can coexist, provided the order among them is real and has actually been decided. The distinction is between a considered rank order, communicated honestly, and an equally weighted list that avoids the hard choice by pretending it doesn’t need to be made, and simply defers the actual decision to whoever happens to be in the room when the conflict eventually surfaces.
If your organization’s list of priorities has grown long enough that you can’t say, with confidence, which one wins when two of them collide, that ranking exercise is worth doing now, deliberately, rather than letting the conflict decide it for you later. Explore coaching services.
Frequently asked questions
If everything is priority, have you prioritized?
No. A long list of “top priorities” isn’t prioritization—it’s things that haven’t been ranked, dressed as a decision. Priority only means something in relation to what it’s ranked above; when items collide, an unranked list provides no answer.
What’s the cost of an unranked priority list?
The cost shows up months later in mid-quarter resourcing conflicts resolved under pressure by whoever is loudest or most immediate—not by the deliberate judgment a real prioritization exercise was supposed to produce in advance.
How should leaders fix a list where everything is top priority?
Force a real rank order—not a tier system that recreates the same problem. If only one could get done this year, which one; then the second; and so on. Communicate the rank honestly to people whose work sits lower—that discomfort costs less trust than discovering later that “top priority” wasn’t true.