Ask most business or transformation leaders how their strategy or transformation programme is going and you'll get the same answer: "we’re flat out." Dashboards are lit up like Christmas Trees, workstreams are multiplying like rabbits in Spring. Everyone is in back-to-back sessions nudging a million to dos forwards at a snail’s pace. Everyone wears busyness like a badge of honour and yet, a 9 months into the year, the organisation often looks and feels remarkably similar to where it started.
We've built a culture, and in transformation it’s particularly dangerous, that treats busyness as evidence of seriousness. If the calendar is full, the work must be real and important. If there are twelve strategic initiatives running instead of three, ambition must be high. In the cold light of day, most of us would agree that activity and impact are not the same thing, so it’s strange that for so many businesses mistaking one for the other is undermining more strategy and transformation programmes than any external market factors ever will.
Why we reward busy
Part of this is structural. Being "seen to be doing something" is politically safer than being seen to have stopped. Busy is important and irreplaceable. A leader who launches five initiatives looks decisive and ambitious. A leader who kills three of them to protect the other two looks, to nervous stakeholders, like someone who's lost their nerve even though the second leader is very likely making the better call.
Michael Porter made the point nearly thirty years ago, and it’s still powerful decades later. Strategy is not the pursuit of best practice or more activity, it is the discipline of choosing what not to do. "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do," he wrote in his classic HBR piece What Is Strategy?
Stop and re-read it again.
It’s so simple to understand and yet so hard to deliver. Trade-offs, not additions, are what make a strategy defensible and hard to copy. Most strategies and transformation plans are not short on ambition. They're short on the courage to leave things off the list.
The evidence backs this up
This isn't just a nice line from a big name in strategy. Bain's research on strategic planning found that the organisations that execute best are the ones that apply what they call "ruthless prioritisation" deliberately putting the largest share of money, time and talent behind a small number of critical opportunities, rather than spreading resource evenly and "satisfactorily" across everything on the roadmap. Satisfactory, in their language, is explicitly not good enough. Who is inspired by or motivated to be satisfactory? Certainly not those in Senior leadership or transformation roles.
McKinsey's long-running research into corporate resource allocation tells a similar story from a different angle: companies that actively reallocate capital and talent between business units and initiatives, rather than funding everything roughly where it was funded last year, consistently outperform those that don't. The common trait across the best reallocators wasn't better forecasting. It was a willingness to defund things that weren't earning their place, on purpose, on a cycle not just in a crisis.
So why don't we call time on things?
If the evidence is this consistent, why do so few leadership teams actually do it in practice? The research on project termination gives an uncomfortable answer: it's rarely a data problem, it's a psychology problem. Studies summarised by the Project Management Institute point to optimism bias as the biggest driver of leaders continuing to fund failing initiatives, a persistent, largely subconscious belief that this project will still turn the corner, even when the evidence in front of them says otherwise. Add in the sunk thinking and simple self-justification, nobody wants to be the person who admits the thing they championed isn't working, (another interesting insight) and you get exactly what most organisations have: a portfolio that quietly balloons rather than sharpens, because ending something is harder than starting it.
Jim Collins named this directly in his famous book Good to Great. The companies that made the leap to greatness weren't the ones with the longest "to-do" list — they were the ones disciplined enough to keep a "stop doing" list, and to stay inside what he called the Hedgehog Concept: a small, clear intersection of what you're genuinely best at, what drives your economics, and what you're deeply committed to and nothing outside it. Discipline, in his research, wasn't about working harder. It was about saying no more often and meaning it.
The brave choice
It’s clear we don’t have an evidence problem, leaders have been reading the research for decades. It's a courage problem. It takes more nerve to stand in front of a board or shareholders and say "we are backing these three things, and only these three things" than it does to fund everyone's pet initiative a little bit and call the result a strategy. But a portfolio of ten half-funded bets rarely beats three that are properly resourced, properly led, and allowed to actually conclude.
If your strategy or transformation plan currently reads as a long list of things that are all, technically, "in progress," the question worth asking isn't "how do we get all this done" it's "what would we be brave enough to stop, so that the things that matter most can actually deliver."
That's the kind of conversations I love having at Great Oaks. I can help teams stop adding more to the plan, and help them make the harder, braver call about what earns a place on it and why. If you're looking at a strategy or transformation portfolio that's busy but not moving, and want an outside perspective on where to concentrate your bets rather than spreading them, that's exactly the kind of work Great Oaks does alongside leadership teams. Let’s talk it through.
Sources
● What Is Strategy? — Michael Porter, Harvard Business Review
● Strategic Planning That Produces Real Strategy — Bain & Company
● Admit It, Your Investments Are Stuck in Neutral — McKinsey
● The Psychology of Project Termination — Project Management Institute
