“The reason why so few executives concentrate is the difficulty of setting ‘posteriorities’ – that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle – and of sticking to the decision.” – Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive (1967)
It’s late September, and the owner has set aside an afternoon with the leadership team for resetting priorities for Q4. Everyone agrees that this time they’ll be ruthless. There’s a shared screen with a slide headed “Priorities for Q4”, and it fills up steadily through the afternoon. By five o’clock there are twelve items on it, and somebody photographs the screen before everyone leaves.
A few days later the owner happens to open January’s plan. Ten of the twelve are there, slightly reworded. “Launch” has become “complete”, “explore” has become “progress”, and one has changed hands without anyone mentioning it. Two are new, added because the year produced concerns nobody saw coming. Nothing has come off. Everyone knew the quarter holds fewer working weeks than the calendar shows, yet the list still assumes the time January thought it had. It was billed as a reset. What the afternoon actually produced was the January list with a September date on it.
A Reset That Keeps Everything
None of this happens because experienced leadership teams can’t prioritise. Ask most of them to rank ten things and they’ll do it quickly, and usually sensibly. The trouble is that ranking ten things does nothing to create the capacity to deliver ten things, and by late September the arguments for keeping something on the list are unusually strong. The annual target still looks rescuable, so the list turns into a plan to rescue all of it.
Then there’s the sponsor. Most items have someone at the table who cares about them, and leaving them on is the kindest way to end the meeting. The list becomes a peace treaty rather than a plan. Some items have simply come too far: eight full months have gone into them, a customer has been told to expect something, and they were announced as important at the start of the year. Priority seven stays because “we’ve come too far to stop now”. Another moves from “critical” to “important”, with exactly the same people and budget still attached.
Stopping, disappointing and excluding are all harder than adding and, in the meeting itself, adding costs nothing. The cost arrives in November. Reordering doesn’t help much either. Moving something down three places changes its position, but it doesn’t remove the work, and rewriting the list isn’t the same as changing it. The September question is plainer, and closer to arithmetic: the order may have changed, but has the list actually become any shorter? It rarely does until some of the old commitments have been formally removed, because deprioritised isn’t the same as finished.
January Had Hope, September Has Evidence
Priority setting in January can’t help resting on assumptions. There’s a forecast, a plan and a reasonable view of how the year should go, but very little evidence either way. By late September the business knows a great deal more. It knows which customers actually bought and which only said they would, which margin assumptions survived contact with real pricing, and who stepped up when it mattered. It knows where cash was tighter than planned, and which “strategic” initiative has spent eight months going nowhere much.
So a reset at this point in the year isn’t a shorter version of January’s plan. It has evidence January didn’t have, and what strikes me is how rarely that evidence gets used. Items survive on the strength of the argument that put them on the list in the first place, rather than on anything the year has shown since. Reading the year properly only matters if you let what you’ve learnt change something.
The evidence doesn’t only point towards stopping, either. Sometimes it says that the one thing that’s actually working deserves more behind it than it has had, whether that’s the product nobody expected much from or the customer type that keeps coming back. Some priorities are rightly aspirational, of course: a longer-term move that has to start before there’s anything to measure. By September, though, analysis is seldom the problem. Acting on what it says is rather harder.
What Thirteen Weeks Can Hold
A quarter is thirteen weeks on paper, and thirteen weeks is enough time for two or three things done properly. It is exactly enough time for ten things to remain untouched. Very few businesses get thirteen completely usable weeks, though. Depending on when the financial year ends, Q4 can run into Christmas and New Year, the long summer shutdown here in South Africa, Easter, or other seasonal interruptions. Add budgeting and the year-end close, which need many of the same senior people, and a list built for thirteen weeks may have something closer to ten useful weeks behind it. Nobody at the table does that subtraction.
Three priorities can look unambitious. A team that leaves the planning afternoon with three may feel it has done less work than one leaving with twelve. Twelve looks substantial on a screen, and everyone around the table can see something from their own part of the business on it. Nobody appears to have lost.
The people below the leadership team see it differently. Every priority creates meetings, decisions, requests for information and arguments about resources, all on top of running the business, and the same few capable people turn up against several supposedly separate priorities.
Felix Oberholzer-Gee, who teaches strategy at Harvard Business School, describes the same thing in much larger organisations: talented people working through “a long list of urgent initiatives”, and companies with “so little to show for so much effort”. His case in Harvard Business Review is for selecting fewer initiatives with greater impact. In owner-led businesses, where the same small group holds most of the load, I’ve found the effect of the long list is sharper still. The priority that gets an hour in October, another in November and is then “rolled into January” was probably never a priority in any real sense.
Three priorities finished properly by December can look less impressive than twelve on the September screen. By January, the comparison tends to look rather different. Choosing the three takes the same strategic focus that goes into deciding which opportunities really deserve the business’s attention, applied to a single quarter rather than to the direction of the whole business. Priority has to mean scarcity, or the word has stopped having any real meaning.
A Name Against Each One
A short list brings its own discomfort. With a dozen priorities, ownership can stay comfortably collective, because everyone is involved in everything. With three, it becomes obvious very quickly whether anyone is actually answerable for moving each one. I’ve watched leadership teams leave a meeting in apparent agreement, with every person hearing “we” where somebody needed to hear their own name. Six weeks later the owner asks, “Who actually owns this one?”, and two directors discover that each had assumed the other was moving it forward.
It’s the old problem of decision ownership, the difference between a decision and an intention, and a priority without a name against it is still a wish. A priority is only really a priority when something else gives way for it: time, money, or a capable person moved off something they were doing perfectly well. If nothing has moved except the wording on the slide, the priority is probably still more aspiration than choice.
When the Quarter Pushes Back
Suppose the business does all of that: reads the year properly, ends a few things, chooses very few priorities and puts a name against each. None of that means the quarter will co-operate. A major customer goes cold in October, a supplier raises prices, a senior person resigns, or something important turns up in November that nobody could have put on a September list.
And then it gets harder. Commitment to a priority can’t mean pretending circumstances haven’t changed, and flexibility can’t mean reopening the list every time a trading week turns uncomfortable. After the first difficult month someone usually wants to revisit what was agreed, and sometimes they’re right, because a new fact has made pressing on unchanged just as questionable. Telling one from the other while it’s happening is a different discipline from setting priorities, and it’s the one the rest of the quarter will test.
Two Lists
Go back to that slide on the shared screen and picture a different version of it. Three items, each with one name against it, and underneath them a second, shorter list of things the business has formally stopped. It’s far less impressive to look at, and far more likely to be true by Christmas. The strongest evidence of a real reset may not be the new priorities at all, but what’s no longer there. Keeping every old commitment into Q4, despite the year’s evidence, is itself a decision, even when nobody describes it as one.
That shorter list may well be the first plan this year that reflects what the business now knows. Some of those three may turn out to be the wrong three, and the quarter will test them soon enough. Still, ground is easier to read once it’s been cleared, and the path becomes easier to see.
If I laid my Q4 list next to my Q1 list, would anyone be able to tell that the business had learnt anything in between?
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