The word “priority” came into the English language in the 1400s, and it was singular, meaning the very first thing, the thing that came before all others. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.
Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about “priorities.”
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Think about your own organisation for a moment.
• How many parallel roadmaps and subroadmaps exist, with engineers smeared fractionally across all of them? For example, does your security roadmap fight with your product roadmap and your performance roadmap?
• How many teams have their own backlog of P0 items, with each saying they need more people to work on them?
• How many initiatives are all happening at once, each with their own sponsor claiming that theirs is the most important, leading to silos and politics?
Here’s the rub: the plural form of the word has given us permission to avoid the hard work of truly deciding what comes first.
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Take ten minutes and try this exercise:
• List everything. Write down every project and initiative currently in flight for your team or department. Don’t filter or categorise yet, just get them all down.
• Force a ranking. Put them in order from one to n. Not tiers, not categories: a single ordered list. No ties allowed.
• Notice the hesitation. Where do you want to create exceptions? Where does it feel impossible to choose? That hesitation is where the real prioritisation work lives.
• Identify who decides. Can you make these choices on your own, or do you need input from your team and peers? If it’s the latter, that conversation is the one you’ve been avoiding.
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it’s priority, not priorities: you should just have one single list.
One list to rule them all. A simple list can make all of the hard decisions happen.
#management #process