Prioritising under pressure: which information gets overlooked?
When time is short, managers must decide which cases to advance and which to defer. The managerial question is specific: how can they prevent that choice from relying mainly on information everyone already knows, at the expense of a decisive fact held by just one person?
What the literature establishes
Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied group decisions in which participants did not all have the same information. In their experimental setting, discussions favoured information shared by several members over information held by only one. For prioritisation, the risk worth examining is therefore that a case familiar to the group receives more discussion than one whose significance is not widely understood.
What the available time changes
Steven J. Karau and Janice R. Kelly (1992, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) manipulated the time available for a group task and observed differences in interaction and performance quality. Their study indicates that available time can change how a group works, not simply how long its discussion lasts. It does not, however, directly test whether time pressure amplifies the information-sharing bias described in the first study.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that discussions simply need to be longer before priorities are set. These studies do not support that general rule: additional time can also be spent repeating what is already known. A more targeted approach is to surface information that could change the ranking of cases, without claiming that these two studies validated that procedure. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of current practice
These experimental studies reproduce neither a bank’s regulatory responsibilities nor authority relationships in a family business. Holding information also does not guarantee that someone can communicate it, particularly when it is confidential or difficult to raise with senior management. Finally, a change in priorities does not, by itself, establish that the new decision is better.
A practical check in Lugano
Within SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, a proposed exercise in Lugano is to compare provisional and final case rankings over two weeks, before and after briefly collecting information previously absent from the discussion. In a bank, fashion company, trading business or Italian-speaking family SME, each manager records in Italian, subject to access permissions, a verifiable fact that could change the ranking: a compliance constraint, collection availability, a missing shipping document or production capacity. The log retains both rankings, the new fact and the reason for each revision; the measure is the proportion of prioritisation decisions whose ranking changes following such a fact. This monitoring can establish whether the step supplies information useful to the decision, but cannot by itself demonstrate improved performance. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Lugano, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Lugano
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