Ping Pong or Poker? How Competing Priorities Overwhelm Leaders (and What to Do Instead)
If you’re a leader today, chances are you’ve felt a pretty consistent pull of competing priorities, urgent requests, and stakeholders who all believe their work matters most. Calendars fill up fast, progress creeps along, and no matter what you do, someone is frustrated.
So, are you playing ping pong or are you dealing poker?
No, ALJ isn’t getting into the sports gambling industry! Ping pong or poker is a metaphor that comes from our founder and CEO Pete Behrens’ book,
Into the Fog: Leadership Stories from the Edge of Uncertainty, and it captures a leadership trap that many of us don’t even realize we’ve fallen into.
Attention ALJ Alumni Community:
Pete will dive deeper into the Ping Pong or Poker chapter of Into the Fog during his upcoming Global Masterclass on Wednesday, Jan. 21. If you’ve completed any ALJ workshop or program, you’re invited! Contact ALJ to get on the list.
Amy’s Story: When Leadership Feels Like Getting Hit From All Sides
From the chapter “Ping Pong or Poker?” in Into the Fog.
Amy didn’t need perfection. She just hoped for clearer priorities. She felt pulled in every direction. Torn. Tugged. Unable to make meaningful progress on anything.
When we met, her team was responsible for supporting multiple business units. They maintained and enhanced essential IT systems that employees and customers relied on daily. Their work was invisible, but absolutely critical.
Amy led a small, capable, and committed team. She prided herself on their health and productivity, but they were stretched thin. Tired and frustrated. Every week brought more requests than they could handle.
She met with stakeholders, gathered feedback, collected enhancement requests, and tried to make it all fit … but it didn’t. It simply couldn’t. And every time she attempted to prioritize one need over another, someone pushed back. Loudly.
The stakeholders weren’t aligned, each one believing their needs were more essential than the others. Every conversation added more conflict.
Multiple times, she had requested additional help to ease her team's burden. Each was denied. “Make it work,” was the message she received.
In fact, when we first spoke, Amy described her role as playing a game of organizational ping pong. Only she wasn't playing. She was the ball.
Ouch.
That image stuck with me. Each stakeholder held a paddle. Her team held a paddle. And Amy? Amy got whacked back and forth between them. The stakeholders didn't accept “no,” so the back-and-forth continued.
That’s not leadership. But it’s the lived reality for many who serve the business, trying to contribute while caught in a constant crossfire of competing priorities.
Amy’s experience reveals something critical that many leaders miss: she wasn’t just dealing with too much work. She was caught between two different tensions at once.
Two Tensions That Trap Leaders
Pete makes an important distinction here. It’s not just that leaders are overwhelmed; it’s that they are often navigating two tensions simultaneously:
- Demand tension: The gap between what the organization wants and what it can realistically deliver.
- Priority tension: The conflict between multiple, competing demands—each backed by different stakeholders, incentives, and definitions of value.
When these tensions aren’t surfaced and shared openly, leaders quietly absorb them. That’s when every day feels like chaos instead of clarity—when you become the ping pong ball.
But here’s what Amy discovered: The solution wasn’t to work harder or find the “right” answer. It was to change the game entirely.
The Breakthrough: From Ping Pong Ball to Poker Dealer
Continued from the chapter “Ping Pong or Poker?” in Into the Fog.
So I asked her, “If you could play any game instead of this one, what would it be?”
She paused. Thought for a moment.
Then said: “I don't know the game … but I wish the stakeholders had to play each other, rather than me.”
There it was. Amy didn’t just want to stop being the ball; she didn't want to be a player in the game at all. She was beginning to imagine her own shift, from player to referee, or perhaps a role on the sidelines. A facilitator. A dealer.
“That's it!” I offered. “What about a game of poker? But not a game you play. You’re the house, you hold the chips, you deal the cards.”
Amy’s eyes lit up. “I love it,” she said. And just like that, a new game was born. Instead of chasing down each stakeholder one by one, she invited them into the same room. She laid out the team’s available capacity, and she asked all of them to propose how best to fill it.
She anticipated a fight. Not just in the meetings themselves, but in the culture shift required to make this happen. Behind closed doors, she jokingly named her meeting Battlezoid. A cage match where egos would collide.
To the stakeholders, she was clear: If you want work prioritized, you must attend the meeting. No more back-channel lobbying. No more “who yells loudest wins.” You must make your case to your peers, not to me.
It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t quiet. But it worked.
What Changed? The Power of Decision Facilitation
So what actually shifted when Amy moved from ping pong to poker? Three things:
- The tension became visible. Instead of Amy absorbing competing priorities privately, everyone saw the constraints and trade-offs together.
- Stakeholders faced each other, not Amy. They had to defend their priorities to peers, not just push harder on Amy.
- Amy’s role transformed. She went from being squeezed between demands to creating the space where decisions could be made collaboratively.
This is what Pete calls
decision facilitation—and it’s one of the most underutilized leadership skills today.
Better Decision Making Matters More Than Perfect Decisions
One of the most powerful ideas in the ping pong versus poker approach is that leadership isn’t about making the “right” decision. (After all, there often isn’t a single right answer.) What matters is how decisions get made.
Decision facilitation means creating space for multiple perspectives, surfacing tension instead of hiding it, and enabling shared understanding—even when not everyone gets their first choice. This approach doesn’t eliminate tension. It puts it to work.
More voices won't always bring alignment. But with better facilitation, they often bring wisdom, expand conversations, deepen empathy, and increase commitment—even from those whose priorities don't win out.
Hit Pause, Then Change the Game
Before trying to squeeze one more productivity system into your day, consider pausing to ask yourself these questions:
First, reflect on your current reality:
- Where in my leadership am I acting like the ping pong ball?
- Whose priorities am I absorbing without making them visible?
- What tensions am I carrying alone that should be shared?
Now, imagine a different game:
- What would it look like to step into the role of dealer instead?
- Who needs to be in the same room together to actually see the trade-offs?
- What decision-making process could I facilitate rather than own alone?
How’d that go? Any a-ha moments or small acknowledgements? Either way, simply noticing how you’re showing up and how priorities are moving around you is enough for today.
Tomorrow, you can consider shuffling the deck and making bigger changes.
Ready to dive deeper? Amy’s story is just one of many leadership journeys in Into the Fog. Each chapter explores a different tension leaders face—from letting go of control to navigating blind spots to building resilience through uncertainty.
About the Author
Betsy Piland is ALJ's Marketing & Communications Manager. She has spent the bulk of her career working in higher education, healthcare, corporate learning and development, and nonprofits—always looking to tell a compelling story that will inspire audiences into action.
When not at work, she can be found digging in her garden, baking something delicious, and spending time with her husband, daughter, and two rescue dogs.
