Changing priorities: what does it cost the work already under way?
Within the “Management complexe” programme at SHR — Swiss Human Resources, changing priorities raises a practical coordination question. When does an urgent request justify interrupting work already under way, and what transition cost should the manager consider?
What the literature establishes
Sophie Leroy (2009, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) shows through experiments that some attention can remain attached to a previous task and affect performance on the next one. This “attention residue” helps explain, in particular, the difficulty of moving away from unfinished work. Reassigning someone therefore does not mean that their full attention becomes immediately available.
A second mechanism: reconfiguring the activity
Joshua S. Rubinstein, David E. Meyer and Jeffrey E. Evans (2001, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance) identify time costs when participants alternate between experimental tasks. Their findings support a model that distinguishes goal shifting from activating the rules required for the new task. This mechanism is not identical to attention residue: resuming an activity also means reinstating the rules needed to perform it.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that good managers should always protect their teams from interruptions. These studies do not compare the cognitive cost of an interruption with the industrial, regulatory or clinical cost of a delayed response. The question is therefore not how to eliminate priority changes, but how to reserve immediate interruptions for situations whose stakes justify them. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot quantify
These experiments do not provide a universal price, in minutes or francs, for each change of priority. Nor do they reproduce the full range of constraints facing a pharmaceutical organisation or a supply chain. Counting interruptions is a starting point, but measures neither their necessity nor their specific effect on work quality.
A practical check in Bâle
Within Basel's pharmaceutical and life sciences ecosystem, a team connecting international R&D with Rhine logistics could test a rule: every non-urgent reassignment is preceded by a note recording the status of the suspended work and the next action needed to resume it. During a four-week pilot, record the reason for each reassignment and measure the time between the scheduled return to the work and the first substantive, timestamped action, defined in advance. Comparing the median delay with that of an equally long baseline period, distinguishing task types and tracking missed critical deadlines, would provide a verifiable indicator, not causal proof. This check offers a practical exercise for SHR's “Management complexe” programme without delaying safety or compliance alerts. To go further: explore the Complex Management training in Basel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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