Scroll your inbox from the last month.

How many messages from senior leaders include some version of this:

• “Need this ASAP.”

• “This just became high urgency.”

• “I know it’s a lot, but this is mission critical.”

Now ask a harder question.

How many of those “high urgency” moments were the result of a true external shock, like a customer escalation or regulatory deadline, and how many were actually the receipt for sloppy planning, late decisions, and leaders avoiding tradeoffs?

If you’re honest, that ratio hurts.

What looks like a culture of hunger is often a culture that cannot plan. High urgency turns into a costume your executives put on when they do not want to face the real problem, which is that your operating model is built on wishful thinking instead of real capacity.

That is not a wellness issue. It is execution risk hiding in plain sight.

The Exhausting Truth: Urgency Is Cheap, Planning Is Expensive

Anyone can fire off a late night “this is urgent” message. It feels decisive. It creates motion. It lets a leader walk away feeling like they did something bold.

Planning is the opposite. Planning forces you to look at everything already on the calendar and admit you cannot have it all. You have to kill or delay work that sounded brilliant in the offsite. You have to make explicit what will slip and who will be disappointed.

That is why so many executive teams unconsciously choose urgency over planning. One is loud and flattering. The other is quiet and uncomfortable.

The problem is that your people pay the bill.

Under constant time pressure, the human brain starts cutting corners. It simplifies choices, leans on shortcuts, and pays less attention to long term consequences while it scrambles to survive whatever date is in front of it. Research on time pressure and mental effort has shown this pattern again and again, including work on how sustained workload pushes people into tunnel vision and error prone decisions (Hockey, 1997).

You see this inside your own company.

Code ships faster, then needs rework. Sales promises slip in legal. Projects cross the finish line and quietly reopen because key questions never got answered. On the surface everyone looks busy. Underneath, you are spinning in place.

That is the real cost of keeping “high urgency” on repeat. You are not accelerating. You are burning planning in the furnace and hoping your best people absorb the smoke.

So the question is not “How do we calm everyone down.” The real question is “How do we stop using urgency as a cover story for leaders who will not plan.”

When Every Fire Drill Is Really A Planning Failure

Most “urgent” situations are not acts of God. They are acts of leadership.

Look closely at the last few fire drills that hit your organization. You will usually find the same pattern under the surface.

1. No Single Owner, Fuzzy Dependencies

The work lived in a committee, a chat channel, or a vague “we.” Nobody owned the full outcome, so decisions bounced around until the deadline suddenly appeared on the horizon.

At that point, leaders slap on the “high urgency” label, not because the work is inherently urgent, but because the lack of ownership finally caught up with them.

2. No Capacity Plan, Just Hope

New work entered the system with zero conversation about what would stop. Leaders said yes to the exciting idea and never touched the boring part, which is the math of people and time.

So months later, when reality shows up, they have only one move. Compress the timeline. Make it urgent. Pretend that pressure is the same thing as capacity.

3. Constant Goal Swaps That Kill Focus

Some executive changed direction three times. Product strategy flipped. Go to market priorities rotated. What started as a clear target turned into a moving scoreboard.

There is hard science here. Research on “goal shielding” shows that people make real progress when they can protect one focal goal from interference by others. Keep swapping goals and you break that shield. Energy spreads thin across everything instead of moving one meaningful thing over the line (Shah, Friedman, Kruglanski, 2002).

In practice, this looks like teams constantly spinning up and winding down work as priorities shift. Everyone looks slammed. Very little compounds.

Urgency is not causing these problems. It is advertising them. Every time you hear “this just became high urgency,” what you are really hearing is “we did not make the hard choices when we should have, so we are going to make you make up for it.”

The longer that pattern runs, the more dangerous it becomes, because it does not just break schedules. It breaks belief.

How Fake Urgency Quietly Destroys Trust In Leadership

Leaders talk a lot about trust. Very few admit the fastest way they erode it.

Trust dies every time someone moves a date up without adjusting scope. Trust dies every time a team works nights to hit a “critical” goal, only to watch leadership abandon it for the next shiny thing. Trust dies every time an employee hears “we care about sustainability” in the town hall, then gets tagged on yet another urgent thread after midnight.

When that keeps happening, smart people stop believing what they hear. They hedge instead.

Language shifts from “I will” to “I’ll try.” From “We commit” to “We’ll do our best.” You already know this pattern from your own data. Ownership language fades, hedging phrases rise, and corrective messages spike as teams scramble to fix rushed decisions. Execution does not slow because people are lazy. It slows because they no longer trust the system to respect their effort.

Your highest performers feel this breakdown first. They are the ones who take every stretch assignment, join every critical meeting, and catch every dropped ball. They do not storm out on Monday. They pull back over quarters. Creativity shrinks. Initiative narrows to “tell me exactly what you want.” By the time exit interviews catch the story, your credibility has been bleeding for months.

This is why chronic urgency is not just a productivity issue. It is a confidence issue. It teaches your best people a brutal lesson.

“Our leaders do not know how to plan, and they are willing to burn us to hide it.”

Once that belief takes hold, no amount of values posters will fix it. Only different behavior will.

Make Urgency A Signal To Fix The System, Not Squeeze The People

If you are a CEO or Chief People Officer, this is where you earn your title.

You do not fix fake urgency with softer language or more gratitude emails. You fix it by turning every “high urgency” episode into a mirror on your planning discipline.

1. Treat Every Fire Drill As A Planning Defect

When something suddenly becomes “all hands,” schedule a short review within seventy two hours of the dust settling.

Ask four questions.

• What signal did we miss or ignore?

• Where was ownership unclear?

• What work should have been de-scoped or killed earlier?

• What specific rule do we change so this pattern is less likely next quarter?

Write the answers down. Share them. The point is not blame. The point is to train your leaders that urgency is not heroic. It is an admission that some part of the system failed.

2. Attach A Cost To Every Use Of The Word “Urgent”

Make one standard non negotiable.

Any time a senior leader labels something high urgency, they must immediately name three things.

• What stops.

• Who is affected.

• How long the sprint lasts and when recovery happens.

If they cannot answer those on the spot, the work does not start.

This single move exposes how much of your urgency is just undisciplined enthusiasm. It also sends a clear message. In this company, urgency is a scarce tool used for real threats, not a flavor of every request.

3. Give Managers Scripts To Challenge Manufactured Urgency

Managers sit at the point where executive pressure turns into human workload. Most of them were never taught how to push back without sounding negative or weak.

Give them simple language.

• Instead of “Sure, we’ll take it,” they ask “What do you want us to delay or drop if we take this now?”

• Instead of “We’ll try,” they say “We can commit to that date if scope stays fixed and nothing else is added.”

• Instead of quietly absorbing overwork, they say “We can support this sprint, then we need a full week where nothing new lands so the team can recover.”

Then you back them up when they use it. The first time a manager challenges fake urgency and you protect them, the culture shifts. People learn that planning is not optional theater. It is the real work.

4. Measure False Urgency Before It Breaks Something Big

You already track revenue, churn, and pipeline. Start tracking urgency.

Look at where words like “urgent” and “ASAP” cluster in your communication tools. Tools like Workplace can surface this in real time, along with shifts in tone, after hours volume, and ownership language. Those are early fingerprints of burnout and execution risk long before you see misses in the board deck.

If one org or one leader generates a disproportionate share of urgent threads, that is not a personality quirk. It is a planning failure with a name on it.

Talk about those patterns in the executive meeting. Put them on the same page as financial performance. Treat them as part of your operating review, not a side topic for HR.

The Real Test Of Leadership In An “Urgent” World

The market will always throw real shocks at you. Competitors move. Customers churn. Systems fail on a random Tuesday afternoon.

Your job is not to eliminate urgency. Your job is to stop manufacturing it.

The companies that win the next decade will not be the ones whose leaders shout “faster” the loudest. They will be the ones whose people quietly say “When we commit, we finish” and actually believe it.

If you are a CEO or CPO, here is the uncomfortable test.

1. Pull the last thirty days of your messages and approvals.

2. Count how many times you used the word urgent.

3. Now count how many times you named what would stop.

If those numbers are not close, you do not have a performance culture. You have a planning problem dressed up as passion.

The good news is you can change it faster than you think.

• Treat every fire drill as a design flaw.

• Attach real cost to the word urgent.

• Train managers to defend capacity.

• Use your own communication data as a dashboard for planning quality.

Do that for one quarter and something subtle will shift. People stop bracing for the next surprise. They start trusting that when leaders say something matters, the system will act like it does.

That is what execution health feels like. Not adrenaline. Not chaos.

Calm. Clear. Relentless in the right places.

Urgency has had the microphone long enough. Planning deserves it back.