A Crisis of Prioritisation

10/05/2022

Our Tech Leader Survey Report found that competing priorities is the number one risk faced by tech organisations.

This is not new. Geoffrey Moore talked about the crisis of prioritisation in 2015,

“Disruptive innovations create crises of prioritization. Whether they strike from outside, or whether you initiate them yourself, it quickly becomes clear there are not enough resources to go around, so how do you allocate them?”

You can read Geoffrey Moore’s article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chapter-one-crisis-prioritization-geoffrey-moore/

And what our survey findings highlight is that this crisis of prioritisation flows down through every person in the organisation.

When it comes to big change projects, to ensure success, organisations must put equal focus on the people as the business priorities.

Survey Findings

While there are many positives from the results, competing priorities is an issue faced by over two thirds of respondents. This is consistent across both our Tech Leaders Survey and Team Speed Checks. The significance of this risk cannot be over emphasized as competing priorities create breeding grounds for silos and slow the organisation down. As one leader said, “You cannot scale with silos.”

Patrick Lencioni, author of ‘The Advantage’ describes the issue best,

“Most of the companies I have encountered over the years seem addicted to having a long list of “top” priorities. As a result, they’re unable to focus on any one of them out of fear that doing so will somewhat increase the likelihood that others will fall by the wayside … however, if everything is important, then nothing is.”