I’m on the phone with the owner of a manufacturing company. He tells me about his week: on Monday customer X wanted everything urgently, on Wednesday customer Y said his order was overdue, on Thursday the sales manager added an opportunity “we couldn’t miss”, on Friday the finance director said cash flow was at risk.
I ask: “What is the real priority?”.
He can’t answer. Every request arrived with urgency. Every urgency seemed real at the moment. In the end, the team doesn’t know where to focus. It starts doing a bit of everything and ends up doing nothing well.
This is the chaos of urgencies.
The problem isn’t that there are many things to do.
The problem is that there is no system to decide what comes first.
When you don’t have a system, every request stays pending like a debt. The customer keeps pushing to get theirs. The salesperson keeps promising impossible things. The owner ends up managing priorities every day on the spot, without clear criteria.
The system that works.
Once all the requests are collected in one place — a work list — you have to answer only two questions for each one.
One: how much value does it generate? Not in the abstract. Concretely. How much money? Which customer has the biggest margin? Which project left undone creates the biggest risk?
Two: how much effort does it cost? How much time does the team need? How many people? Which scarce resource do you have to divert?
With those two answers, the priority is almost automatic. Things with high value and low effort go first. Things with high value and high effort come next, but still ahead of the others. Things with low value — regardless of effort — go to the back of the queue, and often end up never getting done.
This is the critical moment.
When you tell the team that certain things won’t be done because they have low value, the pushback arrives. “But the customer asked for it”, “We couldn’t say no to them”.
Here you have to be firm. It isn’t the team that decides. It isn’t the individual. The system decides. And the system says: this thing, with these numbers, at this moment is not a priority.
With this criterion, false urgencies unmask themselves. Because the real urgency is the one where the ratio between value and effort is truly favourable. Everything else is noise.
The benefit is twofold.
One: the team knows where to focus. It doesn’t scatter its energy in a thousand directions.
Two: the customer understands the criterion. It isn’t the owner’s whim. It’s logic. “This order has this priority because it has this value and this effort. When the situation changes, the priority changes with it.”
When you have a system, chaos turns into flow. And flow generates margin.
In your team, who has the last word on priorities? And does the whole team know it?