Reducing your strategic focus to only a few key projects is the best way to accelerate your progress. But while it sounds good, doing it for real is hard.
Let’s say you are the Founder of a growing start-up, and six weeks ago you had a strategic planning retreat. Somehow, you left with a list of 30 projects!
You already knew that was ridiculous and unachievable. But members of the team argued vociferously, and you didn’t dissuade them.
Then, you read my last article and felt a renewed determination to reduce that list.
You originally thought that 10 projects would be good. But now, you are convinced that 2 or 3 is ideal.
You’ve decided on project removal surgery. Stat!
That’s where the trouble starts.
Against the Tide
First, there’s your own ambition.
Every project on the list matters. With unlimited time and resources, you could do them all. But your resources are limited. Being attached to those projects is understandable. You know how each one of them eventually contributes to hitting your top goals.
Discarding them feels wrong.
Plus, everyone in the organization has at least two of them underway. They are invested.
You know they’ll be upset and feel like their work was a waste of time.
And finally, many of those projects were created by other leadership team members. They truly believe they are essential to the strategy’s success. You failed to convince them once. How will you do it this time?
We’re going to take this in chronological order, because that is how you will encounter each obstacle.
Stop Procrastinating
You may notice that while you have decided on subtraction, you are not doing anything about it. You’re stuck.
Getting yourself into action means confronting two strong and very human biases. The Sunk Cost Fallacy and the Endowment Effect.
We experience sunk cost fallacy every time we consider quitting something in which we have invested time, money or emotion. That includes bad love affairs, failed business efforts and yes, even the list of projects.
We also place a higher value on what we already have, even when it is not valuable. That’s the Endowment Effect.
Although the projects have only existed for a few weeks, you are emotionally invested.
The feelings those biases cause are normal. But they can keep you from optimizing your strategy.
Reframe
Having noticed your own resistance and considered the rationale for it, you may agree that we need a new way to think about this.
Reframing allows us to change the context so that we perceive something differently.
For example, when your muscles are sore after a hard workout, you can think of it as pain caused by the gym. That might dissuade you from working out. But you could reframe muscle pain as a sign that you are growing stronger. Now, the pain feels gratifying, and going to the gym is more attractive.
There are many possible ways to reframe anything. In this case, consider that reducing the number of projects has nothing to do with loss. You are not giving up anything, you are gaining focus and results.
Team Talk
It was you who approved this laundry list. So, changing your mind will demand an explanation. Do more than that. Recruit your team into the joy of focus and the power of more resources for fewer projects.
If they are anything like ALL my coaching clients, they are stressed. Their days are fragmented into too many meetings, too much context shifting, and far too little focused work. This will help.
By reducing the project list, they will benefit by having less to juggle and more time to concentrate —even if they’re not working on a strategic project.
Use the conversation to gain their support. But do NOT include them in the actual culling. It can easily become a turf war in which everyone tries to keep their own projects alive.
Pull the Trigger
Now that you have mentally prepared and laid the groundwork with your team, the problem of choosing winners and losers begins. Obviously, you care about all the projects. How do you choose?
First, you will need a hard and fast rule.
When we use rules to govern our decisions, they are stronger than more general guidelines. For example, if you wanted to reduce your sugar intake, you would be more successful following a rule of “no added sugar” rather than the guideline to eat less sugar. When someone offers you a piece of cake, you simply say “I’m sorry, I don’t eat added sugar”. Easy. No waffling or uncertainty.
You can choose your own rule, but I would make it very restrictive. For example, I recommend no more than 3 initiatives, all of which are direct inferences from the strategy.
What’s Our Strategy Again?
Of course, to use this rule, you must be crystal clear about what your strategy is. Hone it into a single directive if you haven’t already done that. One directive.
This isn’t to suggest that your organization does only one thing: but that only one thing at a time can be the strategic focus. That one thing may encapsulate just a fraction of your entire business model. [Click to tweet this thought]
Say your service is a reading platform and revenue comes from membership dues and bookseller commissions.
Your community of book clubs suggests books and your current strategy is to leverage that social component and grow the recommendation engine.
Under my rule, ONLY projects that directly increase book club recommendations make the list.
Lots of other things are important. For example, adding booksellers, increasing SEO, improving renewals, etc. But they are indirect with respect to the one objective. So, they’re out.
When you start culling, you may also find numerous projects on the list that are simply part of business as usual. For example, the sales team is always adding new members. But that is not specific to the strategy, so it doesn’t belong on the strategic projects list.
Discard Delight
While you are culling you must keep reminding yourself that this is an exercise in gaining focus and effectiveness. Doing the three highest value projects excellently will accelerate your progress in a way that 30 partially complete projects will never do.
When you clean out your closet you get to a kind of flow-state in which all attachment falls away. You feel free and can easily part with concert tees and vintage jackets you’ve hoarded for decades.
In your strategy clear-out, you will experience that same sense of abandon—discarding one project after another.
Joy!
Delivering the New List
Whew! The purge is complete. But even having prepared your team, they will each individually be hoping to keep their entire list. It’s counterintuitive and even a bit self-defeating—but that’s the endowment effect at work.
So, you must re-enroll them into the excitement of narrowing the aperture.
For those whose focus is shifting, you must convert them to embracing the power of this new paradigm.
No more flitting from half-assed task to half-assed task. Instead, they each have a smaller remit and more bandwidth for it.
Ongoing Minimalism
Organizations are like closets. No amount of purging stops new junk from entering. The discipline of continuously revisiting the strategic project list is critical.
That’s why you must guard your crystal-clear strategic objective.
Everyone in your organization is smart and innovative. They constantly invent new ways to create value. And your clients are demanding and vital to you. They will also try to shoe-horn in new tasks.
But however compelling those may be, they probably push you past the three-project limit and don’t directly fulfill the strategic objective. Add them to the Not Doing list and reconsider them at your next strategic review—or establish a role for an emergency project person who does ONLY that.
Focus is fragile. A single additional project can break the back of strategic momentum. So, stay the course. And then, when you revisit the strategy next quarter or next year— be equally as parsimonious with the projects you create.
- One strategic objective.
- No more than three projects.
You will surprise yourself and your team with the speed of your acceleration.
