URGENT.
!
Another email arrives.
URGENT.
Teams pings.
"Sorry to chase, but we really need this by EOD."
Another message.
"Can we get this ordered for immediate delivery?"
Then someone calls.
It's not even lunchtime and somehow you've already accumulated seven things that apparently need doing immediately.
Sound familiar?
You started the morning with a plan.
By lunchtime, you're working through everybody else's urgencies.
I've experienced versions of this throughout my career.
And, if I'm being fair, I'm sure I've contributed to it too.
Because we've all played the urgent card at some point.
Why?
Because it works.
Escalate something and people pay attention.
Put URGENT in the subject line and your email gets noticed.
Message someone directly and you might jump the queue.
Escalate to somebody more senior and suddenly the request that wasn't moving...
moves.
So we learn.
If the normal route isn't getting something done quickly enough, make it urgent.
Other people learn the same thing.
And eventually you create an organisation where everybody is competing to make their signal louder than everybody else's.
That's when urgency starts becoming noise.
Don't get me wrong.
I work in supply chain.
Sometimes things really are urgent.
I've been involved in getting critical medicine across the world with someone waiting at the other end of the supply chain.
That required urgency.
People working all night.
Teams coordinating across time zones.
Orders placed quickly.
Documentation prepared.
Logistics moving.
Customs cleared.
Temperature-controlled supply protected throughout the journey.
In a situation like that, you don't sit around debating whether it fits neatly into today's priorities.
You mobilise.
That's exactly what urgency is for.
I've seen the same principle work well in manufacturing.
At one business earlier in my career, we had a proper escalation process for serious supply problems.
There were plenty of day-to-day issues.
That's supply chain.
But if something genuinely threatened production, perhaps a critical raw material wasn't going to arrive — there was a route for escalating it.
The right people came together.
The problem became visible.
Decisions were made.
Support was mobilised.
And there was an unwritten rule:
If you brought something into that forum, it had better actually be urgent.
That mattered.
Because everyone understood what the signal meant.
Compare that with an organisation where everything carries the same label.
A customer-critical supply problem.
A production line at risk.
A financial opportunity before period-end.
A report somebody wants today.
An email that's been sitting unanswered.
All:
URGENT.
But those things don't have the same consequences.
They might all be important.
They might all deserve attention.
They just aren't equally urgent.
And perhaps that's where we sometimes get it wrong.
Urgency isn't really about how loudly somebody asks.
It's about what happens if we don't act now.
That's something I've become much more conscious of as I've gained experience.
When something lands with me marked urgent, my first reaction these days isn't necessarily to drop everything.
It's to understand why.
What happens if we don't do this now?
When does the consequence actually occur?
Is a customer affected?
Could production stop?
Is there a significant commercial impact?
Has something genuinely unexpected happened?
Or would somebody simply really like it completed today?
Those aren't accusations.
They're questions.
Because without the context, I can't properly judge the priority.
And I've learned the same lesson when I'm the one asking for help.
Don't just tell somebody:
"This is urgent."
Explain what happens if it isn't completed.
If there's a critical consequence at the end of the supply chain, explain it.
If production is at risk tomorrow morning, explain it.
If there's a significant commercial opportunity that disappears at period-end, explain it.
Then the people you're asking to help understand what they're mobilising for.
They have context.
And context allows them to use judgement.
There's one version of this I've become particularly wary of.
The classic Friday-afternoon urgency.
Something lands late in the day.
"We absolutely need this sorted today."
Okay.
What happens next?
If completing our part tonight genuinely changes the outcome, then let's do it.
There are times when asking a team to work late is absolutely the right call.
But what if we finish at eight, nine, ten o'clock...
and the next stage of the process can't happen until Monday morning anyway?
What have we gained?
We've potentially asked people to work into their evening without moving the overall outcome forward at all.
We haven't accelerated the process. We've just moved the pressure upstream.
That's not urgency.
That's poor sequencing.
But there's another question I've learned to ask after the immediate problem has been dealt with.
And I think it's probably the more important one.
Why was this urgent in the first place?
Because urgency rarely begins where it eventually appears.
Take an urgent purchase order.
By the time someone in Procurement receives:
"We need this immediately."
the problem may already have been developing for weeks.
Was the demand visible?
Was it forecast?
Was the lead time understood?
Was the inventory policy appropriate?
Was there a data problem?
Did a process fail?
Did somebody miss something?
Did the strategy change?
Or did something genuinely unpredictable happen?
Those are very different answers.
But they can all eventually arrive at exactly the same place:
Please expedite.
And sometimes the answer sits even higher up the organisation.
Strategy.
A business may deliberately choose to operate with lower inventory.
Less spare capacity.
Fewer suppliers.
Short customer lead times.
Longer replenishment cycles.
Less protection against volatility.
None of those decisions are automatically wrong.
Holding inventory costs money.
Capacity costs money.
Resilience costs money.
Every operating model contains trade-offs.
But those choices have consequences.
If we deliberately remove buffers from a supply chain, we shouldn't necessarily be surprised when that supply chain occasionally requires urgent intervention.
Sometimes urgency isn't a failure of execution.
It's the consequence of a decision we made earlier.
That distinction matters.
Of course, not every emergency could have been planned away.
Suppliers fail.
Demand changes unexpectedly.
Transport gets disrupted.
Customers do things nobody predicted.
Things break.
That's why good supply chains need the ability to mobilise.
But if the same type of emergency keeps happening...
perhaps it isn't an emergency anymore.
Perhaps it's a planning problem.
And that's where constant firefighting becomes particularly dangerous.
Because what gets pushed aside while everyone fights today's fire?
The forecast review.
Supplier development.
Master-data improvement.
Inventory policy.
Process improvement.
Root-cause analysis.
Training.
Planning.
In other words...
Urgent work can displace the work that might have prevented the next urgent problem.
Firefighting creates more firefighting.
And eventually the organisation becomes incredibly good at responding to problems it never finds the time to prevent.
I've been guilty of contributing to this too.
There have undoubtedly been times when I've called something urgent because I wanted it moved up somebody else's list.
Most of us probably have.
That's how these cultures develop.
If escalation gets results, we learn to escalate.
So I've tried to become much more deliberate about the word.
When something genuinely is urgent, I'll say so.
I'll explain the consequence.
I'll ask people to mobilise.
And when necessary, I'll work alongside them until it's done.
But when it isn't?
I try not to manufacture urgency just to get attention.
Because every time we do that, we dilute the signal a little more.
Supply chains will always contain urgency.
They should.
The ability to recognise a genuine problem and bring the right people together quickly is incredibly valuable.
But that ability depends on us protecting what urgency means.
Perhaps that's the real danger when everything becomes urgent.
It isn't simply that everybody gets busier.
It's that eventually we lose the ability to distinguish the signal from the noise.
And one day, something genuinely urgent will arrive.
We need the organisation to recognise the difference.
Theme
Prioritisation
Signal
Urgency only works as a signal while we protect its meaning.
Reflection
Urgency is a useful signal.
But only while we protect its meaning.
When something genuinely requires immediate action, mobilise.
When it doesn't, resist the temptation to create urgency simply to move it up the queue.
And when the same urgent problem keeps returning, don't just get better at responding to it.
Ask why it keeps becoming urgent.
Was it planning?
Data?
Process?
Strategy?
Or was it genuinely something we couldn't have anticipated?
Because sometimes the fire started much earlier than the moment we noticed the smoke.
Question
The next time something lands marked URGENT...
What happens if it isn't done now?
The Demand Signal
Lessons from the front line of supply chain.