Postcards from the Field: Priority Drift
Postcards from the Field is where I share brief field reports from my work with real leadership teams. Rather than polished case studies, these notes surface the moments that stop me mid-session and point to the everyday habits that shape performance when conditions are uncertain. My aim is to translate what I’m seeing in the field into practical value readers can apply in their own teams.
Last week, I flew to one of the hubs of the American financial sector to work with a senior leadership team in a complex service-based organization. Partway through the three-hour workshop, one leader shared an observation that landed with unusual force. They said they spend a great deal of time with their team on the content of the work, the initiatives, the issues, the problems to solve. What they do far less often, especially lately, is step back and clarify priorities.
In an environment shaped by constant churn, external pressure, and political disruption, priorities had quietly become assumed rather than named. What mattered most now was rarely distinguished from what had mattered a month ago, or from what simply felt urgent in the moment. The result was not disengagement or underperformance, but something more subtle and more costly: sustained effort without clear alignment.
As the conversation unfolded, a pattern became visible. Teams were working hard, meetings were full, and responsiveness was high. And yet energy was being diluted across too many competing demands. Without an explicit way to revisit the priority stack, people continued to invest time and attention in work that no longer sat at the top of the organization’s real needs. Calories were being burned, but not consistently in the direction that produced the greatest impact.
This is where the priority stack ritual resonated so strongly. Not as a one-time exercise, but as a low-friction habit. The practice is simple: on a regular cadence, the team names the small number of initiatives that truly sit at the top of the stack right now, explicitly identifies what has moved down, and surfaces what must wait as a result. The power of the ritual is not in ranking importance, but in making tradeoffs visible, shared, and current.
In conditions of perpetual change, clarity decays faster than most leaders realize. Priorities that were once explicit quietly age out of relevance, while new demands pile on without displacing old ones. Teams then default to maintaining everything, even as complexity increases. Priority stacking interrupts that drift. It gives leaders a concrete way to realign effort to evolving realities, reduce friction caused by misdirected work, and concentrate attention where it will actually move outcomes. Over time, this habit becomes a performance advantage, allowing teams to stay responsive without becoming scattered, and productive without burning themselves out in the process.
