Competing priorities and objectives: when two goals cannot both win

A captain is fond of two ports and wants to reach both. A ship cannot sail in two directions at once, so the captain dashes back and forth, burns fuel and arrives nowhere. That small image opens Chapter 1 of Steer, Don't Guess. The trouble is rarely a lack of goals. It is goals that quietly pull against each other, and a winner that nobody picked in a calm hour.

The book's answer is refreshingly practical: one test for goals that share resources, and a second, stricter one for goals that cannot coexist. The difference between the two is where most plans go wrong.

Leave two goals fighting over the same cash, and a crisis picks the winner. The Jirgenson Model has you set their order first, tested on real numbers. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).

Competing priorities vs conflicting goals: the difference that matters

Competing priorities share resources. A bigger cash reserve and a nicer menu both want this month's money; a second location and your Sundays both want your time. They can both be achieved, but not at the same speed, and something has to go first.

Conflicting goals cannot be reached together at all. No order, effort or optimism will make them fit. The model calls it a badly defined goal, the first of the three offsets in Chapter 11: two trains leaving the station in opposite directions.

The trap is treating an impossible pair as if it were merely a question of order. You rank them, you work harder, and you fail anyway, because the problem was never the order. It was the arithmetic.

Competing objectives: the same fight, now with numbers

Competing objectives are the same problem with a target attached. A cash reserve of 2.0 months. A margin of 15%. Forty regular customers. Each number looks settled. None of them says which one wins when the money covers only one.

Andrew's list had exactly this shape: reserve, margin, regulars, complaints and his own hours, each with a target. Every target was sensible on its own. Together they were a tug of war.

A target tells you how far to go. It does not tell you what to drop. So competing objectives get the same two tests as any goals. First, order them with the refusal test. Then check with arithmetic that one state of the business can meet them all.

How to handle competing priorities: decide the order before the storm

When Andrew, the coffee shop owner who runs through the book, first wrote down what he wanted, he found five reasonable goals at odds with one another. To build up cash he would have to cut back on milk, pastries and barista hours. To avoid complaints, he could cut back on none of them. Every step towards one goal pushed another further away.

The book's tool here is the refusal test. Not "what matters most?", which everyone answers beautifully, but: if circumstances forced you to give up your goals one at a time, which would go first, and which would be the last one left? Andrew's answer surprised him. His own time went last on the list; the cash reserve went first, because without it the shop would close and nothing else would matter.

What makes the chapter so persuasive is its account of what happens when you skip this step. A week later the supplier raises the price of milk, and someone asks for another barista on Fridays. Andrew agrees, because he is tired and does not want to argue. A month later he discovers he has run out of money before he ran out of time. Fatigue made the choice for him. Priorities never stay undecided; they are simply decided by whoever is loudest that day.

A competing priorities example: counting goals vs ordering them

One small example in the book shows why the order matters more than the count. Two plans for the end of Andrew's year, with the rows already sorted by his refusal order: the reserve on top, the goal he would defend last; his own hours at the bottom, the goal he would give up first.

Both plans meet four goals out of five. By counting, they are equal. By the refusal order, Plan X wins outright, because the first difference is in row one, the reserve, and Plan X meets it while Plan Y does not. Counting goals and ordering goals give different answers, and the model goes with the order. Settled in one glance.

How to spot conflicting goals: test them against your own numbers

These are harder to see, because each goal looks reasonable on its own. "The lowest prices in the neighbourhood, the best coffee in town and a thirty per cent margin" sounds ambitious, not impossible. The book's advice is to stop arguing about it and run the numbers.

Its worked example is wonderfully concrete. At a revenue of €30,000, Andrew's fixed costs are €18,300 and his variable costs €9,000. He wants both "the lowest price on the street" (10% below today) and a 15% margin. With the price cut, the arithmetic says customer numbers would have to rise by 31% to reach that margin. If the room and the baristas can handle no more than 10% more customers, the two goals cannot both be met. Not "hard": impossible. One of them must be dropped before work begins.

That is the whole method:

1. Write each goal with a number and a deadline.
2. Write down the hard limits: capacity, cash, hours, contracts.
3. Ask whether any single state of the business meets all goals inside those limits.
4. If none does, the goals conflict. Return to the refusal test and drop or reshape the lowest-ranked one.

The five defects to check in any goal list

Chapter 1 adds a five-point check for any goal list. A goal list can fail in five typical ways: mutually exclusive goals (the trap above); a missing necessary requirement, like taxes left off the list; goals that change every Monday; a secondary goal saved at the cost of the main one (expensive beans bought while the reserve is below the safe minimum); and duplicates, the same goal under two names, quietly given double weight. Five minutes with that list catches most of these problems before they cost you a season.

Where this does not reach

The refusal order tells you what you value more; it is not a complete decision machine. It does not tell you how to split the resources left over once constraints and minimum levels are met, and it does not make your goals the right ones. Law, safety and contracts are never part of the trade: if saving your top goal would mean breaking one, the constraint wins and you find another way.

Two choices before the next demand arrives

You have two choices today. Keep the list as it is, and let the loudest demand of the week pick the winner again. Or settle the order now, on one page, while the room is calm.

The order is the first step, not the whole system. It does not tell you when a goal is losing badly enough to act; that is the zones, Chapter 4. It does not catch a plan that is doomed before it starts; that is the three offsets, Chapter 11. For the ten-second version of the test, see how to set priorities when everything is urgent.

Test the logic for free: Chapter 1, with the refusal test. Or get the full control system on Kindle, on Amazon.

Published research

It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:

• Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
• Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
• Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
• GitHub: experiment folder
• Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
• ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552