Strategy demands a priority.

Somehow, just six months before getting married at the very young age of 20, I landed a job as a graphic designer at a publishing house.

Please, let’s not talk about how embarrassing my design portfolio was at the time.

But after working there a while, one day I delivered a project to the Press department (where projects were prepared to run on a printing press larger and longer than most peoples’ homes). It was there I noticed a project folder with three large red ❌ ❌ ❌’s on the outside of the folder.

Seeing ❌ ❌ ❌ in a religious publishing house seemed a bit odd.

So I inquired.

As it turns out, the project folders included notes about deadlines and priority ranking, but one day a “super-urgent project” superseded the scheduled projects.

So they added a big ❌ to that project folder to indicate so.

Over time, more and more department managers started demanding their project get priority status. So more and more project folders received the big ❌.

Until one day, again, an executive demanded priority over all the projects in queue, many of which had an ❌ on them, so this new project folder received two ❌ ❌s.

Which meant this project has “priority over all previously priority projects plus all the others.”

And in time, two ❌ ❌’s became the norm until, you guessed it…

Another project came that was “the most supreme priority of all priorities.”

And that is how the project folder got three ❌ ❌ ❌’s.

Which was soon followed by multiple projects having three ❌ ❌ ❌’s…

Priority can’t be plural.

The chaos of projects marked with an escalating number of ❌’s highlights a critical lapse in leadership: the failure to define and uphold a clear, singular priority. The situation reflected a deeper issue. When everything is urgent, the true essence of priority is diluted. In turn, the hierarchy of needs is blurred.

There is either one priority, or no priority.

A priority in plural (priorities) is simply chickening out on hard decisions.

In his book, Essentialism, Greg McKeown talks about the word ‘priority.’

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prime thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.

Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things.

First things first.

But we can’t bend reality.

You, dear leader, have a finite amount of time, resources, and capital.

The belief you can successfully have five, ten, or more priorities is a guarantee that your resources and capital will get scraped thin like the tiniest bit of butter across a large piece of toast.

Your impact will be lost in the noise and disruption of time marching on.

Your priority should be to bring your resources and capital to bear against the biggest challenge on the horizon.

This is how organizations move, change, and grow.