The symptom
Consider an organisation where a manager escalates a cross-departmental blockage to her director. The director takes it seriously and raises it with a peer director in the affected department. Six weeks later, the blockage is exactly where it started. Nobody dropped the ball, in any of the usual senses — the escalation was heard, discussed, and agreed to matter by everyone who touched it.
This is what priority overload often looks like from the inside: not too many decisions being ignored, but too many decisions arriving at a level where they’re understood and still can’t be resolved, because the two functions involved have no forum in which either is accountable to the other.
The original manager, meanwhile, is left managing around the blockage in the meantime — finding workarounds, absorbing delay, quietly protecting her own team from the consequences of a problem that isn’t hers to solve. That coping capacity is genuinely valuable and genuinely finite. Every unresolved cross-functional escalation currently being absorbed this way is drawing on it, and an organisation with several such escalations running simultaneously can find its middle management layer quietly consumed by exactly this kind of unresolvable, structural friction.
What leaders usually conclude
The default explanation is that senior leaders are too busy, or that this particular issue wasn’t important enough to earn real attention. Both directors in this scenario would reject that characterisation, and reasonably so — they discussed the issue and agreed it mattered. The gap wasn’t attention. It was that neither director had authority over the other’s function, and no structure existed where the two functions were jointly accountable for anything. The escalation reached a level where the problem was fully understood and simply couldn’t go any further, because there was nowhere further, structurally, for it to go.
This distinction matters because the two explanations point to entirely different responses. “Leaders are too busy” suggests the answer is more attention or more urgency — a firmer follow-up email, a more insistent tone, escalating the escalation itself to someone even more senior. “There’s no forum where these two functions are jointly accountable” points somewhere else entirely, toward the absence of any mechanism with the standing to actually resolve a decision that spans both functions’ territory. Misdiagnosing the second as the first tends to produce more escalation meetings that reliably reach agreement and just as reliably change nothing — urgency applied to a problem that urgency was never going to solve.
What the evidence suggests
Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko’s Bain research, published in Harvard Business Review, mapped exactly this kind of gap. Surveying more than 350 companies, they identified recurring decision-making bottlenecks at four points, two of which describe this scenario precisely: function versus function, and centre versus business unit — places where a decision needs joint ownership and the organisation’s structure doesn’t provide it. Only around 15% of the executives they surveyed said their organisation actively helped the business outperform its competitors, and the pattern of stalled cross-boundary decisions was a recurring part of why.
Because this kind of stall doesn’t announce itself as a single dramatic failure, it tends to accumulate as a background hum of unresolved cross-functional issues rather than as any one crisis that forces a structural response. A leadership team can be aware, in a general sense, that “things sometimes get stuck between departments,” while considerably underestimating how many separate issues are currently stuck this way, and how much cumulative senior time is going into repeatedly re-discussing them without resolution.
What multiplies under this condition is not the number of priorities in any objective sense — it’s the number of priorities that require crossing one of these gaps to resolve. An organisation can have a perfectly reasonable total volume of strategic priorities and still experience them as overwhelming, because a disproportionate share require lateral coordination the structure doesn’t support, and each one consumes senior time being re-explained and re-agreed without ever actually moving.
The felt experience of this, from inside a busy leadership team, is rarely “we have too few priorities that require cross-functional resolution.” It’s closer to a generalised sense of being overwhelmed by volume, which naturally invites a response aimed at volume — cutting the total number of initiatives, for instance — even when the actual driver is a narrower subset that happen to sit at exactly the structural fault lines where decisions stall.
Cutting the total number of initiatives can, in this situation, remove entirely the wrong ones — the ones that never needed cross-functional resolution in the first place, because they always sat cleanly within one function’s authority. The initiatives actually causing the strain, the ones stuck at a structural boundary, can survive the cut untouched, simply because volume was never really the variable driving the difficulty.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- What happens, specifically, to problems that fall between two areas of authority rather than cleanly inside one?
- Of the priorities currently competing for the organisation’s attention, how many require a cross-functional decision — and is there anywhere that decision can actually be made jointly?
- Is the volume of priorities really the issue, or is it the proportion that get stuck at exactly this kind of structural gap?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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