Setting priorities with a team: importance against feasibility

2026-07-10

Ask a team to set priorities and you get a ranking. Ask them to score two things separately, and you get a map. That difference is bigger than it looks.

Why one axis is too few

A single question ("how important is this?") produces an order in which the top five get the attention. But importance says nothing about whether something is doable. That is how an organisation ends up with topics everyone considers important and nobody takes on, while the reason for that goes undiscussed.

Score feasibility alongside it and you get four regions instead of one list. And each region calls for a different kind of action.

The four regions

Important and feasible. This is where you start. Not because it matters most, but because the chance of it actually happening is greatest and you build experience.

Important and not feasible. This is the most interesting region, and the one most often handled wrongly. The reflex is to stress the importance again, but that is already high. What works is increasing feasibility: a framework, a mandate, time, resources. Often this is exactly where leadership makes the difference, because individuals cannot solve it themselves.

Feasible and not important. The temptation. Quick results, little resistance, and therefore often the starting point. The risk is that progress gets confused with significance. Let this ride along, but do not build a programme on it.

Neither important nor feasible. Deliberately leave it, and write that down. An explicit "we are not doing this" stops it returning to every meeting.

The easiest topic is seldom the right one. That something can be done quickly is no reason that it should be.

A third signal that often gets missed

There is something the two axes do not look at: whether the group agrees on what a topic actually means. If one half understands something different from the other, an average score is misleading.

We expect the two to be connected: that feasibility scores low precisely on topics where no shared picture exists. Which makes sense, as it is hard to judge whether something will work if you do not know what it is. It is an expectation you can check in your own data, not an established relationship.

If you do see it, the first step is not an action plan but building a shared understanding.

How those axes appear is shown under The process.

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