The Bucket Method
Failing to prioritize well is one of the greatest disservices leaders can do to their teams. But prioritizing effectively is also one of the hardest things to do.
Prioritization is the bridge between clarity and capacity. Without a clear focus from leaders, teams drift, resources are wasted, and strategic goals slip through the cracks.
Why Stack Ranking Matters
To effectively allocate resources, you have to do more than identify a list of important initiatives—you need to stack rank them. This means putting your initiatives, projects, or tasks in a clear order of importance where there is only one #1, one #2, and so on. Regardless of any specific methodology you use to help determine importance—whether it’s impact assessments, ROI models, timeline sequencing, or other sophisticated approaches—stack ranking remains critical. It ensures that your team knows exactly where to focus their energy, empowers them to make decisions, and aligns their efforts without constant guidance.
Why Prioritization Fails
But stack ranking is hard. When leaders have different passions or vested interests, putting one task above another can lead to conflict and uncomfortable conversations.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid:
Trying to do everything at once, creating overlap and inefficiency.
Siloed teams making disconnected decisions.
Chasing trends
Clinging to outdated projects due to sunk costs.
Influential managers pushing pet projects, resulting in misaligned priorities.
That’s why many leaders fall back on a less precise system of high/medium/low scoring. The high/medium/low method is popular because it feels simple (but let's be honest, it's also kind of lazy). It allows leaders to label tasks quickly and move on. However, it almost inevitably results in most tasks being marked as “high priority,” followed by a smaller list of "mediums," and an even smaller list of "lows." This lack of clear differentiation leads to confusion, misalignment, and ultimately, a decline in business performance.
According to Harvard Business Review, "Most executives (64%) report they have too many conflicting priorities. Our research reveals, however, that as an executive team’s priority list grows, the company’s revenue growth in fact declines relative to its peers." <1>
But narrowing down a long list of initiatives is hard!
The Mental Struggle of Prioritization
When leadership teams are faced with this process, they often experience several psychological and cognitive challenges that make the process difficult. When there are too many options to consider, decision fatigue can set in, leading to decreased quality in decision-making. This not only diminishes the effectiveness of prioritization but can also leave leaders feeling less satisfied with their decisions due to the sheer number of possibilities they had to weigh.
Additionally, cognitive overload plays a significant role. The complexity of comparing multiple initiatives across various attributes can overwhelm the team's mental resources. This makes it difficult to effectively make trade-offs, increases the time required for decision-making, and raises the potential for overlooking important factors. As a result, without a clear framework or method to reduce this cognitive burden, leadership teams may struggle to align on the most critical priorities.
I was in a scenario a few years ago where the teams were begging our leadership team to determine priorities because they were overwhelmed by the amount of work on their plates. The leadership team tried repeatedly to respond, but despite multiple all-day sessions using a variety of techniques, we struggled to make progress.
Introducing the Bucket Method
I finally proposed something I called "The Bucket Method" to help us narrow the huge list of initiatives we had into progressively smaller buckets. And it worked!
Here’s how it works:
Initial Sorting: While this is going to be a group effort, it's best to have a single person first take their best shot at placing your entire list of initiatives into three equal buckets. No judgement. Use whatever logical method you want at this point. This is just a starting point. If you're already done a high/medium/low, you can start there. But I would suggest putting that list into two buckets: high and medium/low. And then pouring all the medium/low bucket down the drain. Let those go!
Categorize by Priority: Let’s say there are 60 initiatives (a real number from my past!). The leader presents the group with three priority buckets: 1-20, 21-40, and 41-60.
Team Feedback: Everyone will likely find something to hate about it. That's OK. Let's get it all out. People will focus on why an initiative they care deeply about is not in the top 20. But the constraint of a bucket that can only hold 20 initiatives is our friend. If your initiative moves in, what comes out?
Define Criteria: This is where the magic starts to happen. We need to discuss as a team what our criteria for getting into the top 20 bucket is. Until we agree, we can go no further. Once we agree, we have a basis for ranking. Fair warning, this could take a while.
Refine the Top 20: Once the top 20 are agreed upon, we still need to refine further—ranking all 20 at once can be challenging.
Break into Smaller Buckets: Split the top 20 into smaller buckets (not quite equal) and repeat the process to further narrow the focus.
Final Stack Ranking: At this point, you’re down to a few initiatives that can be stack ranked clearly.
The Science Behind the Bucket Method
I didn't know the science at the time, but I've since learned that the Bucket Method works because it leverages "choice architecture principles" coined by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
The Bucket Method organizes decisions within clear limits, which reduces choice overload and cognitive load. By breaking a large list into smaller, manageable groups, it helps prevent decision fatigue and allows leadership teams to focus more effectively. Studies, such as Sheena Iyengar's research on choice overload and Roy Baumeister's work on decision fatigue, have shown that reducing the number of well-defined options helps minimize decision fatigue and creates a clearer path to execution. Group discussions further align expectations, reduce ambiguity, and increase overall satisfaction by ensuring the prioritization process is transparent and justifiable.
The Power of Ruthless Prioritization
Effective execution begins with ruthless prioritization. Matthew Siegel, SVP and Divisional President, Consumer Services, told me, "I'm a brutalist about prioritization. You have to stack rank the things that you're trying to get done in order and work them in that order." By moving beyond high/medium/low scoring and adopting a structured approach like stack ranking through The Bucket Method technique, you empower your team to focus on what truly matters. Prioritization isn’t about making everyone happy—it’s about making sure your strategy succeeds. Remember, there can only be one number one. Define it, communicate it, and then let everything else fall into place.
<1> Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi, "Stop Chasing Too Many Priorities," Harvard Business Review, April 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/04/stop-chasing-too-many-prioriti}”
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This post is an excerpt from my upcoming book, a practical handbook for executing strategy from an operator’s point of view. Drawing on decades of real-world experience, it’s designed to help leaders turn strategy into action through clear, actionable steps. Stay tuned for more insights and updates as we get closer to launch!