Surface the source of urgency before accepting it

Ask whose urgency it is and whether it was created by a missing upstream action.

Why it works

Team urgency is often manufactured: a task arrives as urgent because someone else didn’t plan, because a deadline was set without negotiation, or because a dependency wasn’t surfaced early. Accepting manufactured urgency rewards bad planning and punishes good planning — and over time, it trains the team to create urgency as a way to get priority. Tracing urgency to its source exposes the pattern and creates pressure to address it upstream rather than absorbing it as a permanent cost.

How to do it

1. When a task arrives as urgent, ask: what event made it urgent today that wasn’t urgent last week?
2. Identify whether the urgency is genuine (external deadline, new information) or manufactured (late planning, missed handoff).
3. For manufactured urgency, handle the current task but name the upstream cause explicitly with the person who created it.
4. Track patterns: which person or process consistently generates urgent tasks from avoidable causes.

Evidence

The mere-urgency effect shows that deadlines inflate the perceived importance of tasks independent of their actual value. In teams, urgency can also be a social signal — requesting something urgently gets it done faster, creating an incentive to escalate. (observational)

The mere-urgency research is on individuals, not teams; the social dynamics of manufactured urgency in groups is principled reasoning rather than a directly tested pattern.

Sources

• Zhu, Yang & Hsee (2018), the mere urgency effect, Journal of Consumer Research

Common mistake

Handling every urgent request without tracing its source, which makes the team a buffer for other people’s planning failures and means the root cause never changes.