I attend, and have attended, several meetings where a member of a team discusses something they are working on that requires support or action from someone else. And that person then goes on to say “Please prioritise this” or “Please make this thing a priority”.
Often, there’s no real end result to the plea to prioritise a thing. The person making it has given no real sense of where we would like to be at some point in the future. They haven’t asked if anything is stopping this becoming a priority. Occasionally, they may describe something terrible that might happen if people don’t prioritise this. One of three things then tends to happen:
1) The people listening prioritise the thing. The thing then happens, and our lives continue.
2) The people listening do not prioritise the thing. The thing doesn’t happen, and then in the next meeting people are either told about the terrible thing that happened because we didn’t prioritise this thing, or are just asked once again to prioritise the thing (even in the face of a growing evidence base that people will not prioritise the thing).
3) The thing somehow resolves itself without anyone prioritising it. Maybe it wasn’t a real thing, or possibly it was a quite different thing. But it’s ok. It’s gone now.
I wonder if, really, the plea to prioritise the thing changes the eventual destiny of the thing at all. Asking someone to prioritise something without knowing all the other things they are doing is pretty ambitious. If you are asking them to fit something from your personal, previously secret priority list into their own personal, currently secret priority list, they may well put it at the bottom of the list. And often do, consciously or otherwise.
When we’re asked to prioritise something, there’s a bit of translation to do as we’re often being asked something quite different, and we have to use context to find that meaning.
What might people actually mean when they say “Can you prioritise this?”
“Can you just do this immediately?” It’s an unhelpfully indirect way of asking, but that person might be asking us to act. Couching it in the language of prioritisation might imply a lack of confidence from the person asking, or it might be an effort to disguise how awful and unpleasant the task actually is.
“Could people listen to me?” An ask for everyone to prioritise something may suggest that the person asking is not heard or roundly ignored in the first instance. It might be an increase in volume, rather than significance.
“Can anyone understand me?” Escalating a thing may suggest that the thing hasn’t been adequately described in the first place. This may be an effort to prompt clarification or questions.
“Can anyone support me with this?” This ask might actually be a request for a few more pairs of hands on a task that now looks a bit bigger than we previously thought.
“Can you empathise with me?” “I’M HAVING A TERRIBLE TIME OVER HERE. PLEASE PRIORITISE ASKING ME IF I’M OK AND MAKING SOME TEA OR SOMETHING. AND SOME BISCUITS. PLEASE LOOK AFTER ME.”
Actual prioritisation is very difficult to do. It’s worth checking that it’s what we’re actually being asked for.