The 'Priority' Hunger Games

The most damaging pattern I see in PMOs isn't a bad framework or a broken tool. It's a favor economy — and it usually starts with a single missed conversation about intake.

When there's no shared standard for what makes a request a real priority, priority defaults to volume and proximity. Whoever asks loudest, asks most often, or holds the most senior title in the room wins the queue. Value, risk, cost of delay — those never actually enter the conversation. They're assumed, not assessed.

I've come to call this the Priority Hunger Games. It's the moment a team's capacity quietly stops being theirs to control.

The cost isn't just a messy backlog. It's the slow erosion of trust in the PMO itself. Because when priority is arbitrary, stakeholders learn something dangerous: the way to get things done is to escalate, not to make a case. Your best-intentioned partners start behaving like your worst ones — because escalation works and patience doesn't.

Fixing this doesn't require a better framework. It requires a visible standard, a visible queue, and permission to say "not now" without apologizing for having a system.

In this series, I'm breaking down what that actually looks like — the four moves I've watched PMO leaders make to rebuild priority as something a request earns, not something a title bestows.

Because 'Yes' only means something when it's protected. And priority, like change, isn't a process. It's a human experience — one your PMO can either shape or be shaped by.

#PMO #priority #intake