Every modern organization knows the scene. The year begins with a clear ambition: grow faster, build stronger brands, improve efficiency and increase team engagement. Difficult, but expected. As a former boss of mine used to say, “If it were easy, the company would not need us.”
The real problem begins when that ambition travels down the organization.
At the top, it looks like vision and strategy. In the middle, it becomes a detailed plan. At the bottom, it becomes an endless, and sometimes confusing, to-do list: strategic pillars, key projects, deliverables, KPIs, dashboards and committees. The organization wanted direction. It produced busyness.
Some complexity is inevitable. As companies grow, expand internationally and face new expectations, requirements accumulate. In some companies, it is revenue management, commercial excellence or procurement. In almost all companies, it is sustainability, DEI, data, compliance or new regulatory constraints. New layers appear too: global, regional, local, field. Each may be justified. Together, they create more stakeholders, require more interfaces, more handoffs and more coordination.
But on top of these structural realities, two avoidable mechanisms make the problem much worse. Both are well-intentioned. Together, they explain why corporate to-do lists grow like weeds after rain.
First Problem: What We Call Strategy Is Often A Shopping List of Projects
I have seen this from both sides: first as a strategy consultant at BCG, then as a CMO and business leader. One uncomfortable lesson has stayed with me: very few companies actually have a strategy.
They usually have a target, a few neatly bundled “strategic pillars”, and a long list of initiatives everyone agrees can contribute to growth. The document looks serious. The workshops were energetic. But the poison is already in the question: “What are all the things we could do to grow?”
That question almost always creates a shopping list: a campaign, an innovation pipeline, new capabilities, a cost-efficiency plan, a culture project and, inevitably, an AI workstream. Because apparently no modern company can survive without one, even when nobody is entirely sure which problem it is meant to solve.
The issue is not that these initiatives are useless. Many may be sensible. The issue is that “sensible” is not the same as “decisive”.
Deriving strategy from objectives sounds logical. It is how most of us were taught: define the ambition, identify the pillars, build the roadmap. But it is also where the trap begins. Once the question becomes “what could help us grow?”, almost every project qualifies. Marketing, sales, digital, finance, supply chain and HR can all explain how their favorite initiatives contribute to growth. So everything stays in.
The final plan becomes a peace treaty between departments, not a sharp answer to a difficult problem. Everyone finds their project in the deck. Very little is truly chosen. Almost nothing is abandoned.
This is why so many strategies become heavy. Not because people lack intelligence. Because the process is designed to include more than it is designed to decide.
Second Problem: Every Layer Wants to Help
The second source of overload is more human. Almost nobody is trying to make the organization more complicated. Every layer believes it is helping.
Senior leaders give detailed direction and work hard to build new capabilities: revenue management, sustainability, design, data, commercial excellence. Corporate teams add frameworks. Regional teams add guidelines and ask markets to cooperate with the new expert teams. Functional specialists add tools, templates and scorecards. Local managers, closest to customers and operational reality, must turn all this into action.
The problem is that each level often sends more than an objective. It sends projects, instructions, methods and reporting requirements. It adds complicatedness.
Instead of saying, “Here is the exact problem we need you to solve,” each layer says to the one below: “Here are the eight things we need you to do, the format in which we need you to report them, and the meeting cadence through which we will check progress.”
Then, because everyone genuinely wants to help, it adds: “And to support you, we have created two new expert teams you will also need to coordinate with.”
This is how helpfulness becomes workload.
The front line spends less time solving problems and more time satisfying expectations from above. Talented people attend meetings, update trackers, answer requests and fill in templates, but gradually lose the connection between their work and the result they are supposed to create.
This is where strategy and HR meet. Burnout does not come only from too many hours. It often comes from too much incoherence. People can work hard when the effort makes sense. What exhausts them is being pulled into overlapping agendas, contradictory requests and endless coordination loops that make progress feel strangely distant.
A company can ask a lot from its people. What it cannot do, without paying a price, is ask for everything at the same time.
Then Results Disappoint, and Hell Gets Unleashed
Things become even worse – yes, apparently that is possible – when performance falls short.
The first problem, vague strategy, creates even more projects. If the business is behind target, the instinct is rarely to narrow the agenda. It is to add more initiatives to close the gap: more workstreams, more task forces, more “quick wins”, more ideas to show that the organization is taking action.
I understand the instinct. As a CMO, I have felt the pressure to do something, to do more, when results were falling short. When the numbers are not where they should be, doing more feels responsible. It reassures the CEO, the CFO, or whichever layer is currently asking difficult questions.
But if the original issue was unclarity on what was holding growth back, adding projects does not solve the problem. It spreads resources thinner. It overloads the same people who are already struggling to execute. It turns a performance gap into a complexity gap.
The second problem also gets worse. When results disappoint, each layer wants reassurance from the layer below: more control, more detailed KPIs, more frequent updates, more approvals, more evidence that someone, somewhere, is in charge.
The intention is legitimate: reduce uncertainty. The effect is brutal. The organization confuses management with surveillance, alignment with micromanagement, and execution with filling spreadsheets. Engagement, creativity and agility are slowly squeezed out of the system.
At the precise moment when teams need clarity, the system manufactures noise.
Start With the Strategic Nut to Crack
Richard Rumelt’s idea of the “crux” offers a better starting point: name the central obstacle, the nut to crack, the thing that makes the ambition hard to reach.
The question that focuses both the mind and the work is: “What is the single most important problem we must solve in order to grow?”
If the issue is loss of pricing power, the answer will differ from weak distribution, poor execution or competitive disruption. The ambition may be identical. The work required is not.
A real strategy should therefore make the to-do list shorter, not longer. It should clarify what matters most, what matters less, and what can be stopped. If a strategy does not help people say no, it is probably not a strategy. It is an elegantly formatted request for exhaustion.
Cascade Intent, Not Tasks
The second discipline is to cascade intent, not tasks.
The military world has long understood this. In fast-changing conditions, no commander can prescribe every movement from the top. What matters is clear intent, understood by the levels below, so people can adapt intelligently when reality refuses to follow the plan.
The same logic applies to organizations. Each level should give the level below a clearer objective, not a longer list of projects. Leadership should explain the problem to solve, why it matters, where the main effort should go, what constraints must be respected, and where the team has freedom to act.
That is the art of the brief. A good brief does not replace people’s judgment with infinite instructions. It helps people use their judgment better.
Start with the crux, the single most important strategic problem. Reduce priorities. Replace task cascades with intent cascades. Create a “no list”. Train leaders to write better briefs.
To-do lists explode because organizations try to compensate for lack of focus with excess activity, and lack of trust with excess control.
The role of leadership is not to fill the agenda. It is to clear the path.
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