Prioritization is a power negotiation, and it stays a knife fight as long as two different questions stay knotted together — what belongs on the list, and how honestly the people in the room will decide. Pull them apart and the fight finally has a floor.
The person who has to announce authority is showing you how little they have — and the same blindness that rewards the performance of judgment over its exercise is what lets organizations automate away the coordination work holding them together.
Surrendering judgment to a confident machine is the same reflex as surrendering it to a confident person. AI didn't introduce the habit — it made it visible.
RTO doesn't fail because people hate offices — it fails because they can tell when they're being managed through narrative. The office is a tool, not a cure.
