Priorities Are Expensive: Why Leaders Must Embrace Complexity
Priorities Are Expensive: Why Leaders Must Embrace Complexity
In modern management literature, prioritizing is treated as a moral virtue.
We are told that if everything is important, nothing is important.
We are taught to rank, to stack, and to execute linearly.
There is a dangerous side to prioritization that rarely gets discussed.
While priorities are possible, they are incredibly expensive.
When you prioritize, you are not just choosing what to do; you are actively choosing what to neglect. You are giving dominance to a subsystem at the cost of the whole system.
True management isn’t about ranking linear tasks; it is about maintaining the dynamic balance of a complex organism.
The High Cost of Subsystem Dominance
An organization is a system. Like the human body, it relies on the simultaneous, healthy function of all its parts: sales, product, support, HR, and engineering.
When we set a priority (e.g., ‘This quarter is all about Sales’), we inadvertently drain resources and attention from other subsystems. We optimize locally, but we degrade globally.
The caveat: Priorities act like a spotlight. They make one area bright and clear, but they cast the rest of the organization into shadow.
If you prioritize speed (a subsystem metric) at the cost of stability (a whole-system necessity), you may hit your requisite quarterly target, but you accrue a technical debt that cripples the organization next year. The priority task was achieved, but the organization as a whole is less healthy.
Prioritization as ‘Lazy Management’
Why are we so obsessed with priorities? Because they offer an escape from complexity.
Reality is messy. Organizations are non-linear, complex adaptive systems. Dealing with twenty intersecting variables is hard. It requires cultural maturity, cognitive competence, and constant adjustment.
Prioritization is often a tool for reductionism. It is an attempt to force a complex reality into a simple, linear list. It feels good because it provides clarity, but that clarity is spurious.
- The trap: ‘Let’s just focus on X’ is often code for ‘I don’t have the energy to understand how X relates to Y and Z.’
- The reality: Ignoring Y and Z doesn’t make them go away; it just ensures they will come back as crises later.
Priorities reduce complexity, but the goal of management should not be to eliminate complexity; it should be to embrace it and manage it competently.
The Shift: From Ranking to Holistic Management
If we stop relying on crude prioritization, what replaces it? Holistic Management.
Holistic management acknowledges that you cannot simply pause the kidney to prioritize the heart. You must manage the flow of resources to ensure the survival of the whole.
Here is how to shift your mindset:
- Visualize the ecosystem, not the list: Stop looking at spreadsheets of ranked tasks. Start looking at maps of dependencies. Ask: ‘If we push hard here, what breaks over there?’
- Bring the cost to the forefront: When a priority is absolutely necessary, admit the cost immediately. ‘We are prioritizing Feature A, which means we are explicitly accepting a higher risk of burnout in Team B.’ Make the invisible cost visible.
- Manage tension, don’t eliminate it: Healthy organizations exist in a state of tension between competing needs (e.g., innovation vs. reliability). Don’t try to win one side. Manage the tension.
Closing provocation
Prioritizing is easy. It requires only the ability to say ‘no.’
Priorities are seductive because they promise progress. But progress at the expense of the whole is fragile.
Managing a whole system is hard. It requires the ability to say, ‘Yes to this, but only if we balance it with that.’ It requires us to stop looking for silver bullets and simple lists, and instead do the hard work of understanding the intricate web of our organizations.
The future belongs to leaders who resist the shortcut of prioritization, can embrace complexity, and are able to manage the organization as a whole.