Why priorities become meaningless when everything remains a priority
I recently went back and re-read two HBR articles on strategy: Michael Porter’s What Is Strategy?and Rose Hollister and Michael Watkins’ Too Many Projects.
They were written more than two decades apart, and approach strategy from quite different perspectives. But reading them together prompted me to reflect on something I have been thinking about for some time in my own leadership practice: we are often much better at deciding what to do than deciding what not to do.
Porter’s article, first published in 1996, makes the case that strategy is fundamentally about choice. It requires trade-offs. An organisation cannot simply pursue every worthwhile opportunity or attempt to be everything at once. Hollister and Watkins approach the problem from another direction, describing the consequences of “initiative overload”: organisations continually adding new projects and priorities without creating the capacity for them by stopping others.
Both ideas feel particularly relevant to the way we approach strategic planning in schools.
Schools are generally quite good at articulating ambition. We can identify what matters, describe where we want to improve and develop thoughtful goals around learning, people, culture, community, technology, facilities and the student experience.
The harder part, I have found, is what happens next. There can be a tendency to treat strategic planning as a reporting framework. We establish goals, identify actions and measures, and then periodically report our progress against them. The strategic plan becomes something we report to the Principal or Board rather than something that actively drives the decisions of the Executive leadership team.
It is a subtle distinction, but an important one. Because, strategy should not simply describe the work we are doing. It should influence the work we choose to do. And, perhaps more importantly, the work we choose not to do.
Strategy and busywork
One of the challenges of leadership is that there is never a shortage of things requiring attention.
Schools are complex organisations. There are students to support, staff to develop, programs to deliver, facilities to maintain, budgets to manage, parents to communicate with and an almost endless stream of operational issues requiring decisions.
Much of this work is important. Some of it is urgent. However, importance and urgency do not necessarily make something strategic.
This is one of the distinctions in Porter’s What Is Strategy? that I find particularly useful. Porter distinguishes between operational effectiveness and strategy. Both matter, but they are not the same thing. In a school context, I think it is very easy for the two to become blurred.
Strategic planning can become an organised description of our operational activity. We take the things we are already doing, place them beneath strategic headings, establish measures and timelines, and suddenly our day-to-day work has acquired the appearance of strategy.
The plan becomes busy but being busy is not the same as being strategic.
A question I increasingly find useful is:
“What are we doing because of our strategy that we would not otherwise be doing?”
And perhaps the more uncomfortable companion:
“What are we choosing not to do because something else matters more?”
Those questions require a different kind of conversation.
The difficulty of subtraction
We are generally quite good at adding things. A new priority emerges. A new opportunity presents itself. Research suggests a different approach. Someone has a good idea. So we add it.
What we are considerably less comfortable doing is removing something else. The result is that strategic planning can become an exercise in accumulation. New priorities are introduced while previous initiatives and expectations remain largely untouched.
This is where Hollister and Watkins’ Too Many Projects feels particularly relevant. They describe “initiative overload”: organisations continually introduce new initiatives but struggle to stop existing ones. The difficulty is that most of these initiatives are perfectly reasonable. They are usually good ideas. However, strategy is not simply the ability to distinguish good ideas from bad ones; it is the ability to distinguish between good ideas.
From reporting to direction
A strategic plan can provide a useful framework for reporting progress to a Principal or Board. But I am increasingly convinced that this is the least interesting thing it can do.
Strategy should help a leadership team make decisions. When the next good idea arrives, it should help us ask:
“Does this advance what we have said matters most?
And… if we choose to do this, what are we prepared to do less of?”
This is where the two HBR articles seem to meet. Porter reminds us that strategy requires trade-offs. Hollister and Watkins show us what can happen when organisations avoid making them.
Perhaps, then, one of the most useful questions in strategic planning is not simply “What are our priorities?” But:
“If these really are our priorities, what are we prepared to stop doing to make room for them?”
The answer might tell us considerably more about our strategy than the plan itself.