Why a Changing Market Demands Clearer Priorities
If this year has taught the short-stay sector anything, it’s how quickly the picture can change.
Businesses across the UAE have had to respond to circumstances they couldn’t have predicted at the start of the year, while continuing to make decisions about pricing, growth, investment, teams and where to focus next. At times, the challenge has been responding to what is happening right now. At others, it has been working out how much of that response should influence what comes next.
As we head towards Q4, that feels particularly relevant.
After an unpredictable period, there is a temptation to prepare for whatever comes next by keeping every option open. New revenue opportunities, different approaches to marketing, technology, partnerships, owner acquisition, operational changes. All can have a perfectly reasonable case for attention.
The problem is that they are competing for the same time, people and resources.
Through the conversations we’ve had across the short-stay ecosystem this year, there has rarely been a shortage of ideas about what a business could do next. The harder decisions have been around what deserves attention now, what can wait and what no longer makes sense at all.
And that feels like a useful place to start when thinking about the next 90 days.
Start with what the last 90 days taught you
When circumstances change quickly, it is easy to spend so much time responding to them that you never properly assess what the response taught you.
Some decisions will have worked and others won’t. Customers may have behaved differently than expected. A temporary change might have uncovered a better way of working. Something that seemed essential at the beginning of the year may now look considerably less important.
Research into learning and reflection supports the value of taking time to examine that experience. Harvard Business School research found that people who deliberately reflected on what they had learned subsequently performed better than those who simply accumulated more experience.
For businesses, the useful question isn’t simply what happened?
It is what do we know now that should change what we do next?
That distinction matters because plans are built on assumptions. When the information changes, some of those assumptions need to change with it.
Before carrying a plan into another quarter, it is worth testing whether the reasons behind it still hold.
Prioritising means making a choice
One pattern has been particularly consistent in the 90-day conversations we’ve facilitated this year – people can identify what needs attention far more easily than they can decide what should come first.
That isn’t surprising.
A property manager may need to acquire owners, improve direct bookings, protect margins and introduce new technology. A supplier might be focused on sales, retention, partnerships and expansion. None of those priorities is necessarily wrong.
But calling all of them priorities doesn’t solve the problem.
More than five decades of research by psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham has shown that specific, challenging goals tend to produce better performance than vague intentions. One reason is that clear goals help direct attention and effort towards the work needed to achieve them.
In practice, that means accepting a trade-off.
If owner acquisition is the most important focus for the next 90 days, what receives less attention as a result? If protecting margin matters most, which opportunity are you prepared not to chase?
A priority becomes meaningful when it influences a decision.
A quarterly goal has to change an ordinary week
Choosing where to focus is still only useful if something changes afterwards.
James Clear makes a useful distinction in Atomic Habits between goals and systems. Goals describe the result you want; systems are the processes that move you towards it. His argument is that focusing on the goal alone is not enough because progress happens through what is repeatedly done. James Clear on goals and systems.
For a business, the gap between the two can be surprisingly large.
“We need to build more partnerships” might be a sensible quarterly priority. But unless that changes somebody’s calendar, activity or behaviour, it remains an intention.
Behavioural research into implementation intentions makes a similar point. Studies have found that people are more likely to act on intentions when they decide in advance when, where or how a behaviour will happen.
So “focus on partnerships” might become identifying five potential partners every Tuesday. “Improve owner retention” might mean speaking to two existing owners each week before there is a problem to solve.
The examples will be different for every business yet the principle is not. A 90-day priority should be visible in an ordinary week.
Don’t plan entirely from inside the business
There is one more problem with deciding what matters next – you are making that decision with the information available to you.
And your view is inevitably incomplete.
An operator sees the market through their portfolio. A revenue specialist sees patterns across different data. A technology provider encounters the same operational challenges across multiple clients. A service provider can hear the same frustration from several businesses before any one of them realises it is widespread.
That doesn’t mean somebody outside the business knows it better than you do.
They may simply see something you don’t.
When people work closely on the same problems every day, assumptions can stop looking like assumptions. They become “how we do things”.
A useful outside perspective can interrupt that.
Sometimes the value isn’t in asking someone else what you should do. It’s in finding out what they would question about what you’re already doing.
Five conversations worth having before Q4
If you’re reviewing the next 90 days, these five conversations are a useful place to begin.
- What has changed? Separate what you expected to happen from what did. What are your numbers, customers, team or the wider market telling you now?
- Which assumption needs another look? Identify something your current plan relies on and ask whether the evidence still supports it.
- What might we be missing? Speak to somebody who sees the market from another angle. Instead of asking for their solution, ask what they would question about yours.
- What deserves the greatest attention for the next 90 days? Choose it. Then decide what you are consciously prepared to leave until later.
- What will be different next week because of that decision? Put the priority into the diary. Give it an action, a frequency or an owner. If nothing changes in an ordinary week, it is unlikely that much will change over the quarter.
Nobody knows exactly what Q4 will bring.
The point of planning isn’t to remove that uncertainty. This year has already shown how unrealistic that would be.
What you can do is make decisions using the information you have now, remain willing to change them when the evidence changes, and be clear enough about your priorities that every new opportunity or challenge doesn’t automatically become another item on the list.
The next 90 days don’t need more priorities. They need clearer ones.
