Your strategic list has 12 priorities. Pick three.

A question we keep coming back to: How can so many capable organisations end up feeling stuck?
Not stuck in capability, stuck in movement. It’s something we’ve noticed. The machinery works. The people are sharp. Yet progress drags. And the pattern behind it isn’t always what CEOs expect.

The pressure to add, add, add

Picture an industrial manufacturer. Healthy book of business, respected in its niche, not a company anyone would call chaotic. But the moment margins tightened, leadership responded by generating activity: more initiatives. Digital overhaul. A new commercial operating model. A talent programme. A sustainability sprint. Someone perhaps even proposed “customer intimacy 2.0”, though no one was quite sure what happened to 1.0.

This instinct makes sense in the room. You feel pressure, so you generate activity. But out in the organisation, all that activity behaves like heavy weather. Teams lean into the wind, working harder and harder, while the overall pace barely changes. And this isn’t because people are lazy or distracted; they’re trying to row in ten different directions at once.

Some leaders will push back here: “But everything on our list matters.” Maybe so. That’s what makes this tricky and why the tactic of “just push harder” rarely delivers what’s promised.

When the list gets too long

Pitcure this moment in that same firm, a Tuesday 4pm steering meeting, where someone finally said what everyone was quietly thinking: “Does anyone know which of these things we’re actually serious about?”
It was an honest question, and no one could answer it cleanly.

The reality inside many organisations is far less polished than the strategy deck suggests. One team is sprinting. Another is half-committed. A third is trying to finish a project that should’ve been stopped three months ago. And somewhere in the middle sits a senior leader wondering why the whole thing feels like running in sand.

We’ve sat in rooms where three separate initiatives were competing for the same two people, both of whom were also expected to run the quarterly planning cycle. You don’t need a framework to see why nothing crosses the line in that environment - you just need eyes.

And this isn’t always straightforward for CEOs to untangle. A lot of the evidence only shows up in side conversations, missed handovers, or that quiet, slightly apologetic “We’re nearly there” update that keeps repeating itself.

The hardest part: Deciding what won’t happen

Let’s pause here because this is where the conversation usually gets uncomfortable.
Focus sounds noble until you’re the one deciding which meaningful initiative doesn’t make the cut. This is the moment where inside-out logic creeps in: “We’ve already invested so much,” or, “We promised this to the board,” or simply, “Stopping this will create noise.”

But in our experience, organisations don’t fail because they choose the wrong three priorities. They fail because they try to make twelve behave like three. A neat mapping exercise “on paper”, impossible in practice.

Some CEOs handle this decisively. Others wrestle with it because every choice has a constituency. And occasionally there’s that odd initiative, the “pet project”, that no one wants to kill but no one can fully justify either. You could call it organisational clutter, but it behaves more like a weak Wi-Fi signal: technically functional, practically useless, quietly slowing everything else down.

There’s one thing that makes these decisions a lot easier: starting from the customer, not the org chart. When you anchor priorities in what truly matters to the people/companies you serve, the trade-offs become clearer. You stop defending pet projects and legacy commitments, and you start asking the more useful question — “Which of these choices genuinely improves the customer’s world?” It doesn’t solve every debate, but it removes a lot of unproductive ones.

What focus actually feels like (and what it doesn’t)

Those organisations that execute genuine focus well, it’s unmistakable. Meetings are shorter because decisions don’t have to be renegotiated. Initiatives move because they’re not fighting for talent. Senior leaders stop playing organisational Tetris with their calendars. You can sense the lift.

And yes, we’ve also seen the opposite play out, the scenario where a company declares “three priorities” but keeps all twelve alive in the background. Nothing really changes except the language.

A small tangent (but relevant, we promise)

There’s a moment in long-distance cycling where riders hit what they call “the false flat.” The road looks level, but it isn’t, and you don’t realise you’re climbing until your legs start to feel heavy. Priority overload is a corporate false flat. From a distance, it looks manageable. Only when you’re in it do you recognise the rising gradient.

We mention this because CEOs often underestimate how steep things have quietly become until someone finally asks, “Why is everything taking so long?”

The discipline to protect what matters

Choosing focus is one thing. Protecting it is another.
Some months, it feels like the organisation keeps handing you reasons to add “just one more thing.” A new customer demand, an unexpected competitor move, a well-argued case from a respected leader. And there’s no perfect rulebook here, this is where judgement lives.

But here’s the nuance we’ve learned the hard way: when you add new priorities faster than old ones finish, you create a backlog of half-built promises. The organisation learns to wait you out. Momentum evaporates.

This isn’t about rigidity. It’s about making the trade-offs visible and sticking with them long enough for the organisation to trust that you mean it.

So where do you begin?

You don’t need a workshop or a new framework. Just take an hour, on your own, and look at your strategic list again. Not the tidy, public-facing three priorities. The real list. The shadow list. The one everyone knows is longer.

Ask yourself which items genuinely move the business you’re trying to become.
Which ones you’re keeping out of obligation.
And which ones have quietly stopped contributing but continue to consume attention.

You won’t get it perfect. No CEO does. But the act of reviewing and being brutally honest with yourself about what stays and what goes is often enough to restart movement.

If nothing else, it gives you one thing your teams have been waiting for: direction they can actually act on.