When every request arrives with URGENT, employees learn one of two behaviours:
Drop everything whenever the loudest person asks. Or stop believing the alarm.
Both are dangerous.
Manufactured emergencies create constant interruption, reward poor planning and pull specialists away from risk reduction. Teams rush routine work, skip checks and lose time for complex thinking.
The deeper cost is cultural: genuine escalation signals become harder to recognise. “Emergency” turns from a defined operating state into a management style.
Urgency Is Allowed. Crisis Theatre Is Not.
A late client document can matter. It can be urgent: a deadline is close; delay has a cost; normal governance can still operate.
It is not an emergency unless there is a serious actual or imminent threat that requires immediate, coordinated, non-routine action. And it is not critical merely because someone forgot it for three days and now wants a signature in ten minutes. Criticality is about unacceptable harm if the thing fails—people, essential services, regulated obligations, core operations, survival—not about volume in the inbox.
Unless waiting creates serious, immediate and escalating harm, handle it as an urgent business task. Prioritise it. Do not activate the crisis machinery. Every false alarm spends a little of the organisation’s attention and trust. Those are resources you need when the real alarm sounds—including a material cyber incident that actually or imminently jeopardizes confidentiality, integrity or availability.
What Chronic Fake Urgency Does to People
Chronic unmanaged workplace stress is associated with burnout, which the WHO characterises through exhaustion, greater mental distance or cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. That is not a wellness footnote. It is an operational-resilience finding. Exhausted, cynical specialists are worse at noticing the incident that is not a performance. They are also the people you will need at 02:13.
Leaders can reduce fake urgency by requiring four things with every escalation:
- The specific threatened outcome
- The deadline and why it exists
- The consequence of waiting
- The person authorised to reprioritise existing work
If the requester cannot name those four, they have a preference, not an emergency. Preferences can still be met. They should not get to commandeer the same authority you reserved for fire, fraud, or a live compromise.
Board question: Does urgency in our company follow defined impact—or hierarchy and volume?
Relevant Sources
- Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon” — World Health Organization — https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases
- Burn-out an occupational phenomenon: International Classification of Diseases — WHO (FAQ) — https://www.who.int/standards/classifications/frequently-asked-questions/burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon
- Cybersecurity Incident — NIST CSRC Glossary — https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/cybersecurity_incident
- Emergency Preparedness and Response: Getting Started — OSHA — https://www.osha.gov/emergency-preparedness
A board that spends its alarm on theatre will not have one left for the incident. I work with directors on urgency rules that protect both people and response capacity. Contact me.