Choose, communicate, stop: The three-word formula most managers still can't master

Prioritisation sounds elementary. In practice, research suggests most people — and most organisations — are remarkably poor at it. Individuals chase achievable goals over important ones, pay off small debts before high-interest ones, and become the 400th person to review a document just to feel productive. Companies spread attention so thinly across competing initiatives that nothing gets the focus it deserves. The Economist surveys the landscape of frameworks designed to address this — Eisenhower matrices, RICE scoring, MoSCoW models, Google's 70:20:10 rule — before landing on a deceptively simple three-part prescription: choose what matters, communicate it clearly, and ruthlessly stop everything else..The Economist.From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..It’s a shame, then, that people are often very bad at setting priorities. Individuals seem to be so motivated by achieving goals of any kind that they find it hard to abandon them. In one lab experiment, Timothy Ballard of the University of Queensland and his co-authors asked participants to pursue two competing goals, and varied the monetary rewards on offer. Even in cases where the reward for achieving one goal was the same as achieving both (and pursuing both made it more likely that neither would be attained), participants tried to get both done.When people have to make a choice about what to do next, they often pick the thing that seems achievable, even if that is not in their interests. A paper by Moty Amar of the Ono Academic College and his co-authors found that indebted consumers prioritised paying off small debts ahead of larger debts with higher interest rates. A tangible sense of progress was more important to them than the rational choice.This kind of behaviour is observable in offices, too. Being the 400th person to review a document adds nothing of value, but at least you can go home with some sort of achievement to your name.Organisations, or rather the people who run them, are not necessarily much better. Some bosses regard everything they ask for as a priority; even if they don’t, their employees may behave as though nothing matters more. Many firms accumulate so many priorities that they suffer the “peanut-butter problem” of attention and resources being spread too thinly across all of them. When Niels Christiansen, chief executive of Lego, took charge of the toymaker, he found lots of examples of this. “We had 100 key enterprise risks. How can you look after 100 different risks without being risk-averse on everything you do?”All sorts of frameworks exist to enable better prioritisation. The Eisenhower matrix is a classic time-management technique for individuals, which involves categorising tasks into quadrants. An urgent and important task belongs at the top of the queue. An important and non-urgent task is the sort that you need to make time for. If you are doing non-urgent and unimportant tasks, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror.The action-priority matrix is another way of dividing tasks into quadrants, this time based on impact and effort. Product teams often use a scoring model called RICE (reach, impact, confidence and effort). MoSCoW is a framework for teams to distinguish between must-have, should-have, could-have and won’t-have features. Google pioneered the 70:20:10 rule for how to allocate resources to innovation: 70% on the core business, 20% on adjacent activities and 10% on totally new ideas. (If the thought of choosing which prioritisation framework to prioritise paralyses you, just choose one at random.)Establishing what matters is not enough, however. If you are setting priorities for a team, you then need to communicate them properly. In 2017 Donald Sull of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his co-authors asked senior executives at 124 organisations to recite their company’s strategic priorities. They found that in the typical company, only about half of its leaders agreed on what these were.When you prioritise a new thing, you also need to deprioritise an existing one. In their book “The Octopus Organisation”, Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner, two Amazon executives, recommend having explicit rules for cancelling initiatives. They give the example of projects that have explicit “go/kill” decision points, and of software projects with “kill criteria” like team attrition rates or time commitments that exceed a certain threshold. The language is excessively martial, but the sentiment is absolutely right. Effective prioritisation means choosing, communicating and stopping. Henceforth to be known as CaraCaS..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Choose, communicate, stop: The three-word formula most managers still can't master

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