How many priorities should your leadership team set?

Maayan Kaplan

Oct 7

2 min read

Three to five. The hard part is choosing which. HorizonAxis and HorizonNorth measure the gap first, so your team ranks every candidate against the same thing.

Twelve dashed outline diamonds scattered on the left, a teal arrow, and four solid teal diamonds stacked in order on the right. — Twelve candidates, four places. The list gets shorter before the year starts, not after.

Why it matters

A priority is a claim on the same people, budget and quarter as every other priority. Twelve claims on one quarter leave the quarter to decide between them, in place of your leadership team.

Last week's post ended at the offsite with a dozen priorities and no tradeoff between any two. This one starts there.

Where it breaks

Adding a priority costs one sentence in a meeting. Removing one costs an argument with the person who owns it. So the list grows at every planning cycle.

The list also has no common measure. Each function brings the priority it owns, sized in its own terms. With nothing to compare them against, a priority's place on the list reflects who argued for it rather than how much of the gap it closes.

How it works

Fix the number before the list. Horizon12 works to a cap of three to five. Set it before the offsite, and every new candidate has to displace one already on the list.

Measure the gap. HorizonAxis, the Strategic Profile Snapshot, reads where your company stands today. HorizonNorth, the Strategic Direction Snapshot, reads where it plans to be, on the same six dimensions. Run HorizonAxis first. HorizonNorth is read against it.

Score every candidate against that gap. A candidate that closes a wide gap earns a place. One that works on a dimension where the gap is already close to zero waits for next year.

Illustrative. Twelve candidate priorities, A to L, each with a bar showing how much of the measured gap it closes. The four that close the largest share, B, E, H and D, are highlighted and move to a ranked list of four places. The other eight are marked next year. — Illustrative. Candidates and scores are examples. Your two reads give your own candidates a common measure.

Rank what remains. Three to five places, in order. When two priorities compete for the same people, the order settles it in advance.

By the numbers

questions in each read

~9 min

to complete each HorizonAxis and HorizonNorth

3-5

priorities, the cap Horizon12 works to

Who decides

Horizon12's AI co-strategist scores both reads on six dimensions and shows the reasoning and the framework behind each score. It does not choose your priorities.

Your leadership team does. The scores give the argument a common measure. Which three to five make the list, and in what order, stays your call.

When to use it

Your last offsite produced more priorities than your leadership team has people to own them.
You are heading into 2027 planning and want to fix the number before the list.
Each function arrives with its own top priority and there is no shared way to rank them.