Last week, at the end of an Executive Committee offsite I was facilitating, one sentence emerged clearly: “our real challenge is prioritization.”
A rare moment of lucidity.
In many organizations, especially when pressure rises, everything becomes a priority.
Initiatives multiply. Ambitions multiply. Objectives multiply.
We talk about execution, performance, engagement.
And yet, this is often where things start to weaken.
Making trade-offs is difficult.
Politically, emotionally, symbolically.
It can feel like losing opportunities and like lacking ambition.
So we keep everything.
Except that what is not decided at the top does not disappear.
It moves down.
And very often, middle management takes the strain.
Managers are expected to make trade-offs without a clear frame.Sustain performance.Handle pressure.Protect their teams.
They find themselves fighting on every front.
And the tension becomes permanent.
Energy erodes.Performance erodes too.
And the whole system starts to weaken.
In agriculture, we know this mechanism well.
An overworked soil will still produce, for a while.Then it becomes depleted.Then it stops producing altogether.
The question is never “can it hold?”
The question is: “what is it becoming over time?”
Organizations work the same way.
They continue to produce.But they do so by depleting the system.
And it does not show immediately.
In a period of drought, a tree reduces its activity.It lets go of certain branches it can no longer nourish.It prioritizes survival and regeneration.
It does not accelerate to compensate.
This offers another way to look at organizations:
working with living systems, not against them.
And that profoundly changes the stance of leadership.
Leadership is no longer only about setting goals and mobilizing teams.
It is about making choices.
Simplifying.Truly prioritizing.Making trade-offs.
Not everything can be a priority.
That is not a sign of weakness.
It is strategic courage.
So maybe the real question is not: “how can we produce more?”
But: what is my organization exhausting in order to keep producing?