The Urgency Trap And Why It Hits Differently in Forensic Science

There is a well-documented quirk in human decision-making: when people face a mix of urgent and important tasks, they reliably choose the urgent ones, even when the important tasks have a larger payoff. Researchers call it the Mere Urgency Effect1. We naturally let artificially timed or “loud” tasks hijack our attention, leading to persistent procrastination on our most meaningful goals. The brain rewards task completion with a small dopamine release, and urgent tasks offer faster closure. The inbox gets cleared, the report gets filed, the call gets returned…the strategic plan sits.

This is a real problem for managers in almost every sector. In forensic science, it is structurally worse, and for a reason that cuts against the obvious assumption.

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A detective calling about a case is urgent, in the emotional sense. There is a person on the other end of the phone, a case with a court date, a victim waiting for an answer—that call feels urgent. But the analysis that detective is waiting for may take days or weeks. The evidence still has to be examined, documented, interpreted, and reported; chemistry does not accelerate because someone called, DNA does not quantify faster because a prosecutor is impatient.

Forensic science operates at the speed of science, inside a government funding structure. The urgency is ambient and continuous while the throughput is slow and deliberate. That combination creates a specific trap: managers spend their attention on the people who are loudest, the detective, the administrator, the oversight committee, while the work that would actually shorten turnaround times and reduce backlogs gets deferred. Not because anyone made a bad decision but because the incoming pressure is visible and the strategic work is not.

Project FORESIGHT data shows the consequences. Over the six-year period from 2011 to 2017, the average 30-day backlog across forensic science grew by nearly 250%. Turnaround times in the average investigative area increased by 60% over the same period. These are not anomalies or artifacts of one bad year. They are the accumulated result of a system where operational demand consistently outpaces the management attention available to address it at the root.

Managing the backlog by working harder is not a strategy. The FORESIGHT data on productivity indexes makes this explicit: when submissions exceed a laboratory’s throughput capacity, no amount of additional effort on individual cases closes the gap. It’s like the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass told Alice about the nature of Looking-Glass Land: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” The lab works harder just to stay where it is, backlog-wise. The system itself requires attention, like process redesign, resource reallocation, strategic choices about which services to prioritize, and those are not tasks that get done between phone calls.

In a private firm, ignoring strategic work has market consequences: customers defect and revenue falls. The signal is clear, even if slow.

In a publicly funded forensic laboratory, there is no such signal. The lab cannot lose the contract. Demand does not redirect itself to a competitor2. What happens instead is that turnaround times lengthen, and investigators learn to submit fewer cases, or only the most serious ones. The laboratory’s scope quietly narrows. The reduction in submissions is sometimes misread as a reduction in demand, when it is actually a behavioral adaptation to poor service. The urgency culture feeds itself: the lab is always behind, always responding, never planning, never catching up.

This is the trap in its fully developed form.

The research on urgency bias suggests that the antidote is structural, not motivational. The issue is not that lab directors lack discipline or vision. The issue is that the environment continuously surfaces urgent signals, like calls, emails, reports due, audits pending, court appearances, and offers almost no natural cues to shift attention toward longer-horizon work. Strategic planning does not send a reminder. Workforce capacity analysis does not have a deadline until it does, and by then it is too late.

Addressing this requires deliberate choices about where managerial time goes, enforced structurally rather than left to willpower. It also requires recognizing that the detective’s call and the three-year staffing plan are both legitimate demands on a director’s attention but only one of them changes the system that is generating the calls.

Responding to every operational pressure is not the same as managing a laboratory. It may feel like leadership because it produces the sensation of productivity and it satisfies the people in front of you. But ultimately it leaves the processes that create the pressure unchanged, and the data shows what that accumulates to over time.

A laboratory that is always urgent is a laboratory that has not yet found time to plan its way out of urgency. That distinction is worth sitting with.

What does your lab’s management time allocation actually look like, and how much of it is structural versus reactive?