A framing Martin Eriksson quotes from a CEO's objection to being pushed toward prioritization: 'the problem with you guys is that you're an OR organization and we're an AND organization.' An AND organization resists forced trade-offs by declaring competing priorities 'equally important' and pursuing all of them; an OR organization accepts that resources are finite and forces an explicit choice.
The framing is offered as naming the actual mechanism by which executive teams dodge strategic trade-offs — 'equally important' is a way of avoiding the discomfort of ranking. It's countered concretely with Physical Prioritization via Post-it Wall Ranking (no ties allowed on the wall) and This-or-That Trade-Off Game (forcing a reaction to a binary pair), both of which make the AND-organization move structurally unavailable.
Real prioritization requires explicitly naming what you will NOT do and what you're choosing to delay — not ranking every initiative "high priority." Leaders who avoid naming these trade-offs out loud are usually protecting relationships (avoiding an uncomfortable "no" to a stakeholder), not protecting the business. See Product Democracy: Consensus Decision-Making as Anti-Pattern for the decision-avoidance pattern this feeds into.