Most IP portfolios are not shaped by strategy. They are shaped by whatever was urgent that week. Renewals get paid because the deadline arrived. Examination responses get filed because the clock was running. Meanwhile, the decisions that actually determine the value of an intellectual property portfolio – what to stop protecting, which jurisdictions no longer earn their place, which inventions justify the next filing – wait for a quiet month that never comes.
Writing in Harvard Business Review on 27 July 2026, executive coach Karen Walker gives this condition a name: ambient urgency. It is the chronic, low-grade state in which everything feels critical, nothing can wait, and decision quality quietly degrades. Her prescription is not another prioritisation framework. It is three tests to run before committing your attention: the replacement test (am I making this decision because only I can make it, or because I am the default?), the compounding test (will this create value that grows over time, or does it just relieve today’s pressure?) and the fear test (am I deferring this call because it is wrong, or because I don’t want to face its consequences?).
What the three tests look like in IP portfolio management
Run those tests against your portfolio and the results are usually uncomfortable. Renewal decisions made by habit fail the replacement test – as I argued in Why IP Strategies Fail: The Gap Between the Decision and the Portfolio, most companies’ IP spending correlates more than 90% with last year’s, which means nobody is really deciding at all. Invention harvesting, inventor relationships and trade secret capture pass the compounding test, and they are exactly the work ambient urgency squeezes out first – the slow erosion I described in The Quiet Decay: Why IP Value Slips When No One Is Watching. And portfolio pruning fails the fear test almost everywhere. Abandoning a granted patent or dropping a jurisdiction reads as an admission that an earlier decision no longer holds, so a company keeps paying renewals in fourteen countries for a product line it exited three years ago. Three questions are worth putting to your next patent portfolio review or IP audit:
– Which IP decisions genuinely need you – the patent-versus-trade-secret calls, the enforcement calls, the direction-setting – and which are you making by default?
– What in this year’s IP budget compounds, and what merely keeps the machine turning?
– What are we still protecting only because ending it would feel like failure?
The test of clear allocation is the same one that applies to any capital decision – the discipline I explored in The Bet You Make Before You Make Any Bet. An IP strategy is a record of trade-offs, made consciously. If your portfolio only ever grows, urgency is making your decisions for you.
Read the article: 3 Questions to Pressure-Test Your Priorities, Karen Walker, Harvard Business Review, 27 July 2026.