Without structural clarity and the ability to prioritise, even the strongest leadership team becomes a bottleneck for the organisation. To put it rather bluntly, one might say that the leadership team has three tasks:
- Shaping the strategy
- Securing the framework for implementation
- Ensuring the culture that supports implementation
The leadership team must therefore decide where the ship is headed, ensure the ship is seaworthy, and make certain there is no mutiny. This is, of course, a gross simplification, and we use it here only as an introduction to a more comprehensive account of strategy implementation itself. For how much should the senior leadership team actually concern itself with implementing the strategy?
If we accept the premise that the senior leadership team must secure the framework for implementation — that is, ensure the ship is seaworthy — then we can probably also quickly agree that it is not the captain who should go out and buy sailcloth and sew a new jib. But the captain and her officers must secure the necessary funds for purchasing the sailcloth and for hiring someone who can sew a new jib. And they must ensure that everyone on the ship agrees on what “seaworthy” means. It must be clear to all what the purpose is: Why are we going on this voyage? It must also be clear what the goal is: We are heading to the Arctic to fish for halibut (x number of kilos, before the ice closes in). And for that to be achievable, we must collaborate with one another in this particular way.
Shaping the Strategy
For many leadership teams, this part is both the most enjoyable and the easiest. Here one is permitted to think broadly and ambitiously, draw on one’s extensive experience, and most often operate in a world of possibilities. Many organisations bring in external assistance for this part of the work — help with market analysis, futures analysis, profitability analysis — and one might also consider whether the organisation is “fit for purpose” and whether acquisitions should be made.
Securing the Framework for Implementation
This part, by contrast, is difficult. For how does one draw boundaries? What is the leadership team’s responsibility, and what should be pushed out into the organisation?
When viewed from a systemic standpoint, this becomes both easier and harder. Easier, because the systemic perspective holds that the receiver determines the message — that is, if the organisation is in doubt, the leadership team has not been clear enough; and harder, because the systemic perspective insists that all parts of the system are mutually dependent. This means that drawing boundaries is not always straightforward.
Using the ship metaphor from earlier, it is the leadership team’s responsibility to ensure there is a budget for a new jib, but it is not the leadership team’s responsibility to know that the jib needs replacing. It is the leadership team’s responsibility to create a culture where everyone (including the most junior deckhand) can say: “The jib is worn and ought to be replaced before we sail to the Arctic” — without fear of reprisals, whether that be dismissal, ridicule, or an outright dressing-down. But it is not the leadership team’s responsibility to ensure that the jib is actually replaced. For this is where trust comes into play again. If the leadership team has been entirely clear about the standard required on board, then everyone knows what “seaworthy” means, and the leadership team demonstrates trust that the crew will speak up if it would be irresponsible to sail to the Arctic for one reason or another.
When one must secure the framework for the entire organisation, it naturally requires a high degree of consensus within the leadership team. And therefore one must probably discuss strategic initiatives in greater depth than one might be accustomed to. This may mean that the leadership team needs to invite the organisation’s experts in to gain a deeper understanding, so that frameworks can be established on an informed basis — not in order to delegate the strategy, but to be able to make informed decisions about how frameworks and rhythms best support the strategic direction. For the devil is, as they say, in the detail, and it is only once you as a leadership team are aligned on what the strategy actually demands in terms of time, capacity, interfaces, behaviour, and accountability that you can set a clear, shared course.
Securing the Culture
It is easy to say that one must secure the culture, but it is genuinely difficult to carry out, for it requires time and dedication. As the Swiss-American psychologist Edgar Schein said: “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.” We do not, however, entirely agree with Schein that culture is the only thing that matters. We firmly believe that the setting of frameworks and governance is equally central. We find, in practice, that organisations become paralysed when goals, frameworks, roles, and responsibilities are unclear. But it is true that one may have a perfectly competitive strategy and the clearest frameworks imaginable, and none of it will help if the culture does not support execution. Culture is the silent layer that determines whether the strategic becomes behaviour — or merely slides.
Elimination Is a Prerequisite for Execution
The leadership team’s most important task is not simply to define the vision, but also to create clarity about which initiatives support that vision — and, at least equally importantly, which do not. This requires not just courage, but also humility. Humility to acknowledge that one cannot do everything, and that resources — time, money, energy — are finite.
If everything is important, then nothing is important. And that which one does not prioritise will end up prioritising the leadership team regardless. Prioritisation is therefore not merely a question of efficiency — it is a question of survival, both as a leadership team and as an organisation.
Build a culture of deliberate elimination. One of the most important things a leadership team can do is to create a culture in which it is legitimate to say no. Elimination is not a weakness — it is a strength. To build such a culture, the leadership team can work with the following:
- Clarity of goals and vision: The clearer the organisation’s overarching objectives, the easier it becomes to prioritise.
- The courage to say no: It requires leadership courage to let go of projects, even when they have already cost time and resources.
- Psychological safety: Team members must be able to challenge one another’s priorities without fear of destructive conflict.
Ego and Elimination – A Difficult Balance
A strong and aligned leadership team manages to create a shared understanding of what matters most, and how the leadership team can best prioritise in order to achieve the organisation’s goals. This requires openness and the ability to accommodate different perspectives, so that one does not end up in a blind prioritisation where everyone is simply trying to protect their own area. It is in dialogue, and in the balance between ego and collective interest, that the best decisions are made.
Ego often plays a significant role in leadership decisions. When a leadership team must prioritise, it can be challenging to let go of projects that one has personally been involved in initiating. The fear of losing face or being perceived as less competent can stand in the way of the necessary eliminations. Similarly, the difficulty of relinquishing a prestige project — one that manifests one’s power and influence — risks preventing the required trade-offs. It is therefore essential that the leadership team creates a culture in which it is legitimate, within a psychologically safe space, to challenge one another’s ideas and decisions without it becoming personal.
As the American psychoanalyst Robert Johnson observed, one grows stronger as an individual when one feels secure and whole in oneself — a state that makes it possible to say no without experiencing it as a personal loss. The same applies in leadership teams: when the individual leader feels secure in their role and does not feel threatened, it becomes easier to listen openly to others’ input and to accept that one does not have all the answers. This is the foundation upon which a leadership team can make wise eliminations.
Strategic Elimination as a Driver of Innovation
Paradoxically, it is often elimination that paves the way for innovation. When an organisation stops spreading its resources thinly across too many initiatives, energy is freed up to pursue the ideas that can truly make a difference. Elimination does not mean passivity or a lack of ambition — quite the contrary. It is about choosing the right battles and putting all available effort into where it matters most.
Steve Jobs once said: “Innovation is about saying no to 1,000 things.” His philosophy was that one can only create something extraordinary if one has the courage to strip away everything unnecessary. Leadership teams that dare to have the difficult conversations and prioritise with rigour create space for precisely the kind of innovation that can drive the business forward.
Elimination Requires Courage and Trust
Strategic elimination is not a one-off decision, but a continuous process. It requires courage to make difficult decisions and trust that the choices being made are the right ones. It also requires the leadership team to have a strong, shared understanding of the organisation’s direction and goals, so that eliminations are not arbitrary but support the overarching strategy. Each elimination is simultaneously a signal to the organisation about what should not be spent time and energy on — and this is often at least as important as communicating what should. It helps the organisation to orient itself, sort through priorities, and adjust its own efforts accordingly.
But elimination almost always provokes reactions. It can stir unease, resistance, or frustration — not necessarily because the decision is wrong, but because it carries consequence. Resistance to elimination is not a sign that one has chosen wrongly — it is a sign that the choice has weight. It therefore requires both decisiveness and persistence to establish a practice of strategic elimination that holds over time.
Here it plays a crucial role that the leadership team invests energy in working on itself as a team. And this can perfectly well be done in parallel with working on strategy implementation, budgets, and operations — what many perceive as “the real work.”
When a leadership team consciously works on its internal dynamics, there is a greater likelihood that difficult topics can be discussed openly and that the necessary eliminations can be made. This creates not only better decisions, but also a stronger and more cohesive leadership team.
The Great Reward
When the leadership team masters strategic elimination, the organisation’s capacity for execution increases markedly. Focus sharpens, resources are deployed more effectively, and employees experience greater clarity and direction. This creates not only better results, but also greater job satisfaction and engagement.
It takes discipline, courage, and humility to do fewer things better. It is about taking responsibility for which tasks genuinely create value — and letting go of the rest. Only in this way can a leader create organisations with real capacity for action and lasting success.
Doing Fewer Things Better
We live in an era in which the complexity of organisations is greater than ever before. The demands of innovation, sustainability, digitalisation, and growth place an enormous burden on leaders the world over. Under this pressure, it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to solve all problems at once. But in reality, the ability to choose to set things aside — strategic elimination — may be the most important tool a leadership team has at its disposal for creating genuine momentum and capacity for action.
A great deal of the complexity pressing down on modern organisations is not externally imposed — it is self-created. New structures, new initiatives, new metrics. Many management systems end up making leadership harder rather than easier. Elimination and simplification are not merely necessary for success — they are necessary simply to be able to navigate at all.
When one is in the thick of all the many, many demands and tasks of daily working life, everything can feel urgently important, and the ability to prioritise becomes absolutely critical to the possibility of success. As a Chief Strategy Officer at a global manufacturing company put it:
“When everything is equally important, nobody knows what actually matters — and so everyone tries to chase all of it. That creates chaos.”
It is therefore not simply about saying no, but about being able to point clearly to what truly counts — and letting the rest wait. This is a discipline that requires leadership courage, a solid shared foundation, and an ongoing conversation about what is important now — and what may be allowed to become important later.
When Everything Is Important
When leadership teams fail to prioritise rigorously enough, three things happen:
- Focus is lost: Everyone runs in different directions, and the leadership team becomes more of a coordination group than a strategic focal point.
- Resources are drained: People become frustrated and ineffective because they cannot deliver properly on any of their tasks.
- Momentum is lost: Instead of creating large, tangible results, one delivers small, invisible improvements that nobody notices.
When clear eliminations are not made at the top, it falls to middle managers and teams to prioritise for themselves. The result is often duplication of effort, unclear success criteria, and organisational fatigue — not because people are unwilling, but because leadership has not created sufficient clarity. It is not employees’ capacity to execute that is lacking — it is the organisation’s capacity to choose and to set aside.
Strategy Requires Elimination — Not Wishful Thinking
Prioritisation might initially sound like a practical discipline. But in reality it is a courageous strategic act. For every elimination stirs emotions — within the team and out in the organisation. But the time and energy the leadership team invests in sharp prioritisation will almost certainly return tenfold.
Waste — and Why It Is Important to Talk About It
A frequently overlooked dimension of the prioritisation discussion is waste. Many organisations today work with principles from Lean, agile, or similar approaches — and a central principle in these approaches is precisely to reduce waste: waste of time, waste of energy, waste of human capacity.
Waste arises in leadership teams when one…
- …launches too many initiatives without completing them
- …revisits decisions because genuine alignment was never reached
- …holds unnecessary meetings without purpose, or without decisions being followed up
- …spends considerable resources on KPIs and reporting that are never actually used to steer by
A department manager expressed it this way: “We had KPIs on virtually everything — but nobody had asked whether they were actually being used. So we measured and measured, and in the end all we knew was that we were busy. Not whether we were on the right track.”
The question that ought to be asked is: “Where is the most energy being wasted — and how can it be stopped?”
By using Lean principles as a mirror for one’s own work, the leadership team can identify dysfunctional patterns. A simple reflection such as: “Where in our management practice is genuine value being created — and where is it not?” can open up important conversations.
When waste becomes a shared concern rather than an individual accusation, it becomes possible to clear things up without generating resistance. Lean is, at its core, about respect for time and people — and it begins in the leadership team.
The Illusion of Strategy
Strategy and prioritisation are inextricably linked. Richard Rumelt, American professor of strategy and author of Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, warns against two particularly prevalent errors that frequently arise in the absence of genuine prioritisation:
- Confusing goals with strategy: Organisations risk presenting desired outcomes (e.g. growth, market share, efficiency gains) as strategy. But goals without a precise plan for how to achieve them are not strategy — they are wishful thinking. As Rumelt articulates it, this very error was part of Lehman Brothers’ downfall: grand ambitions, but no genuinely coherent strategy for managing risk.
- Poor strategic objectives: When leadership teams draw up a long list of goals without prioritising or connecting them, it becomes genuinely impossible to steer by anything whatsoever. The list may look perfectly presentable on a PowerPoint slide, but it offers neither direction nor clarity in practice.
And here the paradox arises: the more goals there are, the harder it becomes to decide what must give way. Instead of creating a strong, shared direction, leadership teams end up outsourcing prioritisation to the organisation — which then either becomes paralysed or heads off in different directions. When clear eliminations are not made at the top, they emerge further down the system — often invisibly and without coordination. Rumelt’s point is simple and sharp: if everything is strategy, then nothing is strategy. The leadership team’s task is to cut through and make it clear what actually matters — and why. Strategic clarity and elimination are necessary for prioritisation and execution to be possible.
One reason it can be so difficult to make eliminations is that many people confuse strategy with ambition. This makes it almost impossible to prioritise, and it is precisely this problem that Richard Rumelt addresses.
Focus on What Matters
The fact is that leadership teams must focus on the essential strategic elements and not spend unnecessary time on operational details that can be handled by middle managers. Having a solid overview of your most important KPIs gives you the composure and decision-making power that comes from data rather than guesswork. Just bear in mind that 50 KPIs do not provide clarity — but 5 do.
The leadership team’s ability to prioritise strategic initiatives clearly, distinctly, and unambiguously can be an enormous productivity booster, for if there is anything that consumes time and focus further down in the organisation, it is uncertainty about priorities. It seeps out into departments and causes paralysis. The leadership team must do fewer things better, and this is one of the most challenging and important disciplines to focus on when one is constantly bombarded with demands for productivity, innovation, and multitasking. When the principle of doing fewer things better is applied consciously and consistently, you can revolutionise both your individual leadership and the leadership team’s collective effectiveness. It is about prioritising what matters most, building quality into the work carried out, and creating lasting results.
At leadership team level, the challenge of doing fewer things better becomes even more complex. Here it is not only about individual priorities, but about reaching consensus on which strategic goals are the most important and which initiatives should be prioritised.
Many leadership teams experience this as having to dismantle an entire infrastructure of habits, expectations, and commitments. There is always someone waiting for an answer. Always a project already under way. Always someone who believes their case is important. It requires a strong shared understanding to be able to say: “It is not that it is unimportant — it is simply not the most important thing right now.”
Furthermore, it is essential not to confuse speed with progress. If there is constant busyness but nobody really knows where they are headed, or what should be different when they get there, that is not execution — it is merely organisational noise.
It is easy to agree that one should focus on what is essential. But the difficult part is working out how to do so in practice. How does one make decisions that have genuine impact — and stand behind them? This is where the discipline of prioritisation comes in.
Focus on Two to Three Projects
Research shows that when one attempts to run more than two to three major projects simultaneously, quality, engagement, and pace all fall dramatically. Leadership teams juggling five to seven priorities end up with half-finished solutions and burnt-out staff.
Leadership teams frequently underestimate the hidden costs of spreading attention: decision fatigue, scarcity of implementation capacity, and the dilution of meaningful results. It is not the number of initiatives that creates value — it is the ability to carry them through with depth and consequence. Or as a senior executive put it in one of our interviews: “We thought we were driving transformation. In reality, we were just running faster between more fires.”
In his book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, Sean Covey establishes that a team can focus on a maximum of two to three WIGs (Wildly Important Goals) at any one time. WIGs are the goals that make a radical difference — the things that truly count. Everything else is noise. It is important here, however, to distinguish between WIGs and strategic focus areas, as they are not the same thing. WIGs have a shorter time horizon, typically three to twelve months, whereas strategic focus areas typically have time horizons of two to five years.
As a leadership team, your first task is therefore to agree on what sits above the line — that is, what matters most for the strategy, the organisation, and the customers. The concept of “above and below the line” comes from the agile world and is extraordinarily well-suited to visualising the need to make choices. Above the line sit the tasks and projects that are prioritised and have resources behind them. Below the line sits everything that must wait — the good ideas, the secondary projects, and that which we must let go of for now.
The problem is that many leadership teams insist on keeping everything above the line. This is a recipe for chaos, stress, and mediocrity. A strong leadership team dares to let things sit below the line and to communicate clearly: “We are not doing this right now, because we must first succeed with what matters most.” And as has been said, it takes courage to say no and hold firm when everyone in the organisation is pulling at you to get their projects through. But if you do not, you are not a leadership team — you are simply a group of leaders working in parallel silos.
The following therefore applies:
- One WIG is excellent.
- Two WIGs is realistic.
- Three WIGs is the limit.
Everything beyond that is not prioritisation — it is self-deception.
From Plan to Practice — When Prioritisation Becomes Leadership
It is one thing to understand the necessity of elimination. It is quite another to translate that understanding into concrete practice within the leadership team’s work. So what does it look like when prioritisation is not merely planning, but an active, strategic leadership discipline? And what does it require of leadership teams to make choices that truly have impact?
Prioritisation — As a Leadership Decision, Not Merely as Planning
When a leadership team chooses to do fewer things better, this is not about effective task management. It is about exercising leadership. Strategic leadership. This means that prioritisation must not be reduced to a planning exercise. It must be a deliberate choice, grounded in a shared understanding of what creates value for the organisation’s future — and what the organisation must do to succeed.
This entails a commitment to discussing consequences. For a prioritisation is not merely a choice in favour of something — it is equally a choice against something else. And if it is not clear what has been set aside, this generates noise, uncertainty, and competing pressures further out in the organisation.
All too often, something is declared “strategically important” without the necessary budget following, which means that the organisation is expected, for example, to manage the implementation of a new ERP system within the time and resources already in place.
That is not prioritisation. That is wishful thinking.
As the senior leadership team, you have a particular obligation to be clear about the consequences of your priorities. What does this elimination mean for the other initiatives? What is being shelved — temporarily or permanently? Who will be affected — and how will they be supported? And perhaps most importantly of all: what will the organisation not be judged on right now?
It is in those conversations that prioritisation becomes concrete and tangible. Not as PowerPoint presentations with four columns and nine initiatives — but as a shared decision about how to put real force behind what matters most.
When you can articulate what is not being done — and still stand behind it — that is a good sign that the prioritisation is genuine. If nobody is upset, you probably have not prioritised rigorously enough. And if someone says: “We can surely just do all of it”, then remember to ask the simple question: “How?” For it takes people, energy, and focus to deliver. If you spread yourself too thin, you deliver nothing of significance.
So the next time you as a leadership team are sitting with 15 projects that all feel urgent, take a deep breath and ask: “What are the leadership team’s WIGs? What can wait? And how do we ensure that we are working as a leadership team and not as a collection of individual project managers?”
Organisational Constipation
Morten Münster, in his book Jytte vender tilbage, describes how too many simultaneous tasks create constipation. If you launch 15 initiatives at once, they are executed slowly — and none of them will in all likelihood ever be properly completed. If you launch three initiatives, complete them — and then launch three new ones — you achieve results more quickly and with fewer frustrations. So prioritise! Create space in the funnel before pouring more in. Throughput speed is the key to better execution.
Elimination is thus not merely an efficiency exercise — it is the leadership discipline that makes it possible to lift what truly counts.
Prioritisation as Rhythm
Strategic prioritisation is, however, not a one-off exercise, but a leadership rhythm — a practice that requires attention, reflection, and the courage to adjust. What the leadership team decides today will not necessarily be right in six months’ time. Not because the decision was wrong, but because the context will have changed. If priorities are not calibrated on an ongoing basis, they risk hardening into dogma. Projects continue because they are already under way. Resources are tied to initiatives that nobody believes in any longer. And nobody dares to raise the discussion, because doing so would feel like a step backwards.
But there is nothing wrong with correcting course — quite the contrary. It is precisely the ability to adapt and adjust that distinguishes an action-oriented leadership team from a reactive one.
Calibration does not, however, mean constantly changing strategy. It means that, as a leadership team, you have a regular rhythm for revisiting your most important commitments and eliminations: What has changed? What has the leadership team learnt? What must be held firm — and what must one have the courage to park?
A simple question can be sufficient: “Would we make this choice again today, if we were facing the same decision now?” If the answer is no, you should ask yourselves: “Why are we still doing it, then?”