Five senior executives. 29 projects to prioritise. One unanimous decision. 20 minutes.
- Rebecca Speirs
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
That happened at a New Zealand Bank for a phase of a risk programme I worked on.
I built a physical, colour-coded priority board that put every project in the room at once. All 29. Visible, sortable, comparable.
The executives could see the trade-offs between value, cost, risk and other key factors in real time. They didn't need a lengthy workshop to align. The clarity of the information design did the work. They viewed, discussed, moved one item nearer the top and confirmed alignment in less than 20 minutes.
When people are attempting to make decisions from the abstract — across decks, emails, and competing spreadsheets — it takes longer to align. You're not looking at the same picture.
When everyone's looking at the same picture, decisions happen fast.
The practical takeaway: before your next prioritisation exercise, ask whether your decision-makers can actually see the full portfolio at once — not just their slice of it. That one shift changes the conversation entirely.
I work with senior leaders in mining, energy, and financial services to turn complex portfolios into clear choices — so senior teams can decide in one meeting, not five.
If you're sitting on a prioritisation backlog that's been stuck for a while, happy to share more about how I structured that session.