Ask five people on a leadership team to name the top three priorities. If you get five different lists, the problem is rarely disagreement. More often the team agreed on a long list, and each person quietly shortened it in a different way.
Jim Marsh, author of Culture OS and Managing Principal of JEM Premier Coaching, has publicly described Clarity as stable priorities, defined outcomes, and explicit tradeoffs. This article focuses on the third part, because it is the one teams most often skip. The writing template and examples are practical additions for this article, not material from the book.
A priority without a tradeoff is a wish
When a new priority is added and nothing is removed, the work still has to fit into the same hours. Somebody decides what gives. Usually that person is closest to the work, has the least context on the whole picture, and does not announce the choice. The leader then sees an initiative slipping and cannot say why.
Naming the tradeoff moves that decision to the people who should make it. It also gives the team permission to say no to something without a negotiation every time.
Write the priority in four lines
For each priority on your short list, write four lines. Keep each to one sentence.
- Outcome: What result must exist, described as a result and not an activity. "Customers receive orders within the promised window" is an outcome. "Improve fulfillment" is an activity.
- By when: The date the outcome matters to the business, and why that date.
- We will stop or delay: The specific work that gives way. Name it.
- We will decline: The kinds of requests that will not be accepted while this priority is live.
The third and fourth lines feel uncomfortable to write. That discomfort is the point. If nobody wants to commit to what gives way, the priority is not yet a priority.
An illustrative example
This scenario is hypothetical and written for explanation only.
A leadership team decides that this quarter's top priority is migrating a set of customers to a new service process. The first draft says "Make the migration successful." After applying the four lines, the statement reads: the outcome is that all customers in the first group are using the new process with no open escalations; the date is the end of the quarter because the old process is being retired; the team will delay two internal reporting improvements until next quarter; and it will decline custom exceptions for individual customers unless a named executive approves them.
Now a manager who receives a request for a reporting improvement has an answer. So does a salesperson who is asked for a one-off exception. Nobody has to guess.
Stability matters as much as definition
Jim's description of Clarity includes stable priorities. A clear priority that changes every two weeks teaches people to wait and see before committing. Before changing a priority, ask whether the facts changed or only the attention. When the priority must change, say so directly, state what the old priority's work becomes, and update the four lines so the team does not carry two versions in their heads.
Test your clarity in ten minutes
Ask each team member to write the top priorities and the things that are currently lower priority, privately, without discussion. Compare the answers. Look for three things: whether the order matches, whether the lower-priority items match, and whether anyone listed work that nobody else counted. The differences are your clarity gap, and they are far easier to fix in a meeting than after another month of misaligned effort.
What leaders can do this week
- Choose the one priority that matters most and write its four lines.
- Share them with your team and ask what is missing from the stop and decline lines.
- Pay attention to the next request that conflicts with them, and answer it with the written tradeoff.
If your team keeps returning to the same unresolved priority, the Culture-to-Execution Sprint gives an intact team of up to 8 to 10 people a 12-week structure for working on one live execution problem together.