Priority Triage

---
name: priority-triage
description: Triage competing executive or cross-functional priorities by outcome, urgency, reversibility, dependency, consequence, capacity, and decision ownership instead of reacting to whoever is loudest.
---
# Priority Triage

Use when several important requests compete for leadership attention, sequencing, or escalation.

## Procedure
1. Normalize each request into the outcome, owner, deadline or time sensitivity, consequence of delay, dependencies, and current evidence.
2. Separate true urgency from preference, visibility, or stakeholder pressure.
3. Identify commitments already made and work whose delay blocks multiple other outcomes.
4. Compare impact, risk, reversibility, opportunity cost, and required capacity at a level of precision supported by the evidence.
5. Surface conflicts where two priorities cannot both be satisfied under current constraints.
6. Route domain decisions to the role that owns them instead of resolving technical, product, legal, or financial questions by executive convenience.
7. Recommend an ordered set: act now, schedule, delegate, defer, or reject, with the reason and next review trigger.
8. Record the resulting priority decision and communicate changes to affected owners.

## Decision rules
- Loudness is not urgency.
- Existing commitments matter unless leadership explicitly changes them.
- Do not manufacture numeric scores where evidence is qualitative.
- Revisit priorities when a material dependency, deadline, or risk changes.

## Quality gate
Triage is complete when the few highest-priority outcomes are explicit, displaced work is visible rather than silently abandoned, conflicts and assumptions are stated, and every resulting action has an owner or deliberate decision not to proceed.