The idea with forced prioritisation is to find the core elements of a story.
In journalism, writers can lose sight of this and the most important element of the story can slip too far down in the story structure. This means inverted pyramid stories can fail. The problem is that people can see really complex nuances in a story or material, and are tempted to just linger there and make things complicated.
If there’s a good takeaway, you can’t have another thing be the takeaway. The idea with the sure-thing principle is that it doesn’t always work. The idea of uncertainty altogether can change human behaviour.1 Finding the core of the idea helps us escape this, to avoid bad choices by reminding ourselves of what’s important.
In a group setting, the commander’s intent should shine through. Even if workers don’t have the same intuitive sense as the leader, if they know the core idea of what they should be doing, they’ll do it pretty well.
Footnotes
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Like if there’s two good alternatives to the default. We might be inclined to just pick the default. ↩