The dry-erase marker squeaks against the whiteboard, a high-pitched protest that mirrors the tightening in my chest as the ninth executive stands up to add her ‘non-negotiable’ pillar to the quarterly plan. The board is already a chaotic tapestry of nineteen different colors, each representing a mission-critical objective that supposedly requires our absolute, undivided attention. I am sitting in the back, my hands still smelling faintly of the industrial sealant I used at 3:09 AM to stop my guest bathroom toilet from turning the hallway into a lagoon. There is a specific kind of clarity that comes from kneeling on a cold tile floor in the middle of the night, wrestling with a stubborn flapper valve while the rest of the world sleeps. It’s a physical, undeniable reality: if the water is leaking, you fix the leak or you accept the flood. You don’t get to ‘pivot’ to the faucet if the base is cracked.

But here, in this climate-controlled room with its 49-dollar artisanal sandwiches, reality is a flexible concept. The leadership team is currently engaged in the most dangerous game in corporate history: the refusal to choose. They call it ‘strategic expansion,’ but those of us who actually have to execute the work know it by its real name-priority inflation. It is a power move, disguised as ambition, that allows those at the top to avoid the moral discomfort of saying ‘no’ to a good idea so they can say ‘yes’ to a great one.

The Retail Specialist’s Perspective

Emma J.-C. is sitting two chairs down from me, her eyes glazed over as she stares at a PowerPoint slide detailing ‘Project 109.’ Emma is a retail theft prevention specialist, a woman who spends her days thinking about the physics of shoplifting and the psychology of a desperate person in a blind spot. She understands tradeoffs better than anyone I know. In her world, if you put 29 security tags on a single jacket, the customer won’t buy it because it’s too heavy and annoying to try on. If you lock every high-value item in a glass case, your sales drop by 39 percent because people hate asking for permission to touch things. Retail is a constant, brutal calculation of acceptable loss.

I watched Emma last week as she walked a store floor. She didn’t look at the cameras; she looked at the gaps in the shelving. She told me that a store with 89 different security protocols is actually easier to rob than one with three solid ones. ‘When you give people too many rules,’ she whispered, ‘they stop following any of them. They just try to survive the shift.’

The Illusion of Priority

That’s the secret the people in this boardroom won’t admit. By refusing to rank these nineteen priorities, they aren’t actually ensuring that everything gets done. They are ensuring that the people on the ground-the Emmas of the world-are the ones who have to make the hard choices. When everything is a ‘Priority 1,’ the person with the most items on their plate becomes the de facto CEO, because they are the ones deciding which email to ignore and which fire to let burn. It is a cowardly delegation of strategy to the very people least empowered to handle the consequences of those choices.

I’m thinking about that flapper valve again. A toilet is a simple system of pressure and gravity. If you try to increase the flush power without considering the pipe diameter, you get a mess. Organizations are no different. We have a finite amount of cognitive ‘pipe,’ yet we keep trying to shove more ‘flush’ through the system. My hands are still slightly stained from the sealant. It’s a messy job, fixing what’s broken, and it’s usually thankless. No one celebrates the fact that the bathroom didn’t flood. They only notice when it does.

The Comfort of Technical Failure

There is a strange comfort in technical failure. A toilet is either fixed or it isn’t. There is no ‘alignment’ required with the plumbing. Strategy, however, is a realm of ceremonial language. We use words like ‘synergy’ and ‘holistic’ to mask the fact that we are terrified of being wrong. If an executive picks only three priorities and one fails, they are 33 percent a failure. But if they pick 19 priorities and five fail, they can point to the 14 ‘successes’ and call it a win. It’s a hedge against personal accountability.

We often talk about the importance of จีคลับ and the way clarity in expectations can transform a team’s output, but clarity is the enemy of the insecure leader. Clarity creates a trail. It creates a yardstick by which you can be measured. If I tell you that my only goal this year is to reduce retail shrink by 29 percent, and it only goes down by 9 percent, I have failed. But if I tell you my goals are to reduce shrink, improve employee morale, redesign the storefront, implement a new AI-driven inventory system, and host 49 community outreach events, I can always find a metric that looks green on a spreadsheet.

Busyness as a Shield

I once spent 79 hours over a single week trying to reorganize a regional distribution center’s loss prevention workflow. I was so convinced I could do it all-the data entry, the physical audits, the staff training-that I ended up doing none of it well. I missed a shipment of 509 high-end electronics because I was too busy color-coding a spreadsheet for a meeting that eventually got canceled. I felt like a hero while I was doing it, the ‘hardest worker in the room,’ but I was actually just a martyr for my own inability to prioritize. I was doing the same thing these executives are doing now: using busyness as a shield against the pain of focus.

Emma catches my eye. She leans over and scribbles something on a Post-it note: ‘How many of these survive the first weekend of December?’

It’s a fair question. In retail, December is the Great Filter. All the theoretical strategies and ‘innovative’ protocols are stripped away by the sheer force of 1009 angry customers looking for the last discounted gaming console. In the heat of that moment, no one cares about the ‘strategic pillars.’ They care about whether the line is moving and whether the sensors are actually catching the people walking out with unpaid merchandise.

Organizational Debt and Burnout

Priority inflation is essentially a form of organizational debt. We take out a loan on our future capacity by promising to do more than we are capable of today. The interest on that debt is paid in burnout, turnover, and the slow erosion of trust. When a team is told for the 99th time that a new project is the ‘top priority,’ they don’t get excited. They don’t sharpen their tools. They just lower their heads and wait for the next wave to crash over them. They learn that the word ‘priority’ is just noise-a sound the bosses make when they are feeling anxious.

I think about the 59 minutes I spent trying to find the right wrench this morning. Everything was a mess in my toolbox because I had tried to organize it three different ways over the last year and finished none of them. I had a metric wrench set mixed with a standard set, and a bunch of specialized retail security bits I’d tossed in ‘just in case.’ My lack of focus at 3:09 AM made a simple job take three times longer than it should have.

The Cathedral on a Swamp

The room is getting warmer. The ninth executive is still talking, now explaining how our nineteen priorities actually fit into four ‘mega-themes.’ It’s a beautiful piece of architectural fiction. He’s taking the chaos and trying to make it look like a cathedral. But a cathedral built on a swamp is just a very expensive way to sink.

I want to stand up and tell them about the toilet. I want to tell them that the sealant is still under my fingernails and that the only thing that matters in a crisis is knowing exactly which valve to turn. But I don’t. I just sit there and watch the nineteen priorities turn into twenty-nine as the marketing VP decides we also need a ‘brand refresh’ to go along with the inventory overhaul.

The Bravery of Less

We have taught our organizations that ‘more’ is a sign of strength and ‘less’ is a sign of weakness. We have forgotten that the most powerful thing a leader can do is stand in front of a room of ambitious, talented people and say, ‘We are only going to do these three things. Everything else, no matter how good it is, will have to wait.’ That kind of bravery is rare because it requires you to take the blame if those three things go wrong.

Emma J.-C. stands up to leave as the meeting breaks for a 19-minute lunch. She looks at the whiteboard one last time, shakes her head, and walks out toward the elevator. She’s probably going to a store where a real problem exists-a broken lock, a blind spot, a person trying to walk out with a $979 television. In her world, you can’t hide behind ‘mega-themes.’ You either stop the theft or you don’t.

The Real Problem

As for me, I’m going home to check on my guest bathroom. I suspect the fix I put in at 3:09 AM was just a temporary patch. I was too tired to do it perfectly, and I was trying to fix the leaky sink at the same time. I fell into the same trap. I tried to do two things at once and now I’ll probably have to spend my Saturday morning doing it all over again.

Maybe the real reason we keep multiplying our priorities is that we’re all just tired. We’re so exhausted by the constant leak of expectations that we’ve lost the ability to find the main valve. We just keep grabbing more buckets, hoping that if we swing them fast enough, we won’t notice the water rising around our ankles. But the water doesn’t care about our effort. It doesn’t care about our ‘pillars.’ It only cares about the hole in the floor.

Next time, I’m only bringing one wrench. I’m only fixing one leak. And if the rest of the house floods while I’m doing it, at least I’ll know I did one thing right. That’s a kind of success most of these executives will never understand, wrapped in their nineteen layers of strategic safety. Truth isn’t found in a ‘mega-theme.’ It’s found in the sealant under your fingernails and the silence of a toilet that finally, mercifully, stops running.