When Everything Is a Priority, Nothing Is
How to work with leaders who can't stop shifting the goalposts
In a workshop last week, a participant described something all too familiar.
She’s a team lead. Conscientious, capable, the kind of person who takes seriously the idea that her team deserves clarity. So she puts in the work: she builds the roadmap, she curates the backlog, she has the difficult conversations about what the team will and won’t be doing this quarter.
And then, reliably, about a week later, the ground shifts.
Leadership changes the goal posts. A new initiative lands from above. Something that was critical is suddenly not, and something that wasn’t on anyone’s radar is now urgent. The roadmap she spent days constructing is virtually obsolete and she has to start again.
Adaptability Vs Momentum
Right from the outset it’s important to talk candidly about an important tradeoff.
To state the obvious, companies (and, by extension, teams) need to adapt in the face of changing circumstances. So there is relentless, legitimate logic for changing direction (usually at smaller levels of scope). Adaptability is highly valuable.
By contrast, teams take time to get up to their full speed. They have to get used to their problem space as currently understood and become effective working together on the solutions they pick. They also need the satisfaction of building and winning together, which takes time. Momentum is highly valuable.
More adaptability means more change which means less momentum. The more teams have to pivot, the more their delivery slows down. So there is some maximum point on a curve where the value achieved through adaptability exactly balances the cost it creates.
The unpleasant reality for managers thinking “can we just be left alone for a few weeks to actually deliver something” is that the curve may actually force a “no” answer to that question. Leaders must confront this question and align on its answer whenever they feel like teams have too little momentum (or, indeed, too much - implying stagnation).
With that tradeoff clarified, let’s look at the case that was troubling our workshop participant: leaders injecting unjustifiable amounts of change and not allowing team momentum to build.
What’s Actually Happening
The word ‘priority’ is from the same Latin root as ‘prior’ and, originally, just meant ‘first’ or ‘foremost’. For centuries it was used consistently to mean ‘this thing over that thing’. The idea that people could have a ‘list of priorities’ meaning merely ‘a list of important things’ is a very modern usage that really took hold in the 1950s.
The problem is that we allowed the concept of priority to drift at the same time as the word did. Everything became a priority and so nothing was.
Once you hollow out a concept like that, predictable things rush in to fill the gap. In business, the most important thing is now often determined by…
whoever shouted loudest in the last meeting
whatever landed in the CEO’s inbox most recently
which project belongs to whomever has the most political capital
and so forth
Why Leaders Do This (And It’s Not Because They’re Villains)
In our experience working with organisations, goalpost-shifting usually has one of a few root causes, and they’re worth understanding, because naming the cause changes what you can do about it.
They’re absorbing external shocks badly. Markets shift. Boards apply pressure. Investors change their minds. These are real forces, and leaders genuinely have to respond to them. The problem isn’t the response. It’s that many leaders pass that disruption straight down the chain without filtering it. They transmit the shock immediately rather than asking: does this actually change what my team should be doing tomorrow, or am I just anxious?
They genuinely don’t realise how often they’re doing it. This one is uncomfortable but important. Leaders rarely experience the cumulative effect of their direction changes. They announce a new priority and move on to their next meeting. They don’t see the two days of roadmap work that just became redundant, the team conversation that now has to be unpicked, the quiet erosion of confidence in whether any plan is worth making. No one tells them, because telling them feels risky.
They lack a real strategy, so everything feels urgent. We wrote about this previously: a strategy is, at its core, a decision about what you won’t be doing. Without that, every opportunity looks equally compelling, every threat equally pressing. The priority list expands to fill the available space, and the team beneath it bears the weight.
None of these explanations excuse the impact. But understanding which one you’re dealing with changes the conversation you might need to have.
What You Can Do From Where You Sit
This is where most articles aimed at leaders would offer a framework for them to implement. But if you’re reading this as someone on the receiving end, you probably don’t need to be told that someone higher up should do better. You need something you can actually use.
Here are three things worth trying…
💡 Make the cost visible, not as a complaint but as information. Leaders who don’t realise how often they’re shifting priorities need data, not frustration. Try keeping a simple log, not to weaponise it, but to be able to say, calmly and factually: “In the last six weeks, the team’s primary focus has changed four times. I want to make sure we’re accounting for the costs of that.”
📍Ask the sequencing question before you build the roadmap. Rather than presenting a finished plan that can be overturned, try presenting a high-level version of the proposed sequence and asking leadership to confirm it makes sense. “Here’s the order I’m planning to work in, and what that means we’ll get to later. Does that match your current thinking?” This ensures they have that little bit of existing logic in their heads when they consider coming to you a week later to change your priorities. It also tells you something useful if they can’t confirm the sequence: a leader who struggles to say ‘yes, that order makes sense’ probably doesn’t have a settled strategy yet. That’s worth knowing before you invest in a detailed plan. The same logic applies when a new priority lands mid-cycle. Rather than debating whether the change should happen, ask what it displaces: ‘If we pick this up, what comes off the list?’ Most leaders haven’t thought through the displacement, and naming it forces a real trade-off decision and if they can’t answer it, that’s important information too.
🥽 Protect your team’s sense of agency within the uncertainty. You may not be able to stop the goalposts from moving. But you can be honest with your team about the instability, rather than pretending each new direction is the final one. Teams that understand the context (we’re in a period where leadership is working through competing pressures) are more resilient than teams who are told everything is fine and then watch it change again. Honesty about uncertainty is more stabilising than false certainty.
If You’re The One Setting Priorities
If you lead a team and some of this is landing differently (maybe you’re recognising yourself in the description of the goalpost-shifter) then the question isn’t…
“Am I doing this?”
It’s…
“How often am I doing this and what’s the cumulative effect?”
The people on your team who are doing what our participant was doing, building clarity, curating the work, having the hard conversations, are doing something valuable and fragile. Every unfiltered priority shift you pass down chips away at their belief that the management work is worth doing carefully.
A simple habit worth building: before passing a new priority down, ask yourself one question, am I responding to a real strategic shift, or am I transmitting my own anxiety? You don’t have to get it right every time. You just have to pause long enough to ask.
The Roadmap Is Not The Problem
A roadmap built on shifting sand is a construction problem, not a cartography problem.
What our workshop participant, and anyone in a similar position, needs is leadership that takes seriously its role as a shock absorber, not a shock conductor. And while we can’t always engineer that from below, we can name what’s happening, ask better questions, and refuse to internalize the dysfunction as a personal failure.
If any of this resonates with dynamics you’re navigating in your team or organisation, speak to us about coaching and workshops