Ask a leadership team for their strategy and you will receive a list of ambitions. Ask instead what the organisation has stopped doing in the last year, and you learn what the strategy actually is. Resources move when something releases them. Nothing else is movement; it is intention.
The missing second list
Every priority implies a displacement. A new market means less attention on an old one. A quality push means saying no to volume somewhere. Strategy documents that name the first half and stay silent on the second are asking middle management to make the real choices — which they will, invisibly and inconsistently.
Writing the stop list
We ask clients to publish the stop list with the same ceremony as the priorities. It is a short document and a difficult one, because every line has an owner and a constituency. That difficulty is the point. If nothing on the list hurts, the strategy has not chosen anything.
Written by
Michael Brennan
Partner
Michael leads our work with industrial and logistics clients. Before Hallam he ran operations for a mid-market manufacturer, which still shapes how he thinks about plans that have to survive contact with a factory floor.
