There's a meeting that happens in every organization. The leadership team gathers around a crisis (or an opportunity, or a planning cycle). Ideas are generated. Proposals are debated. Initiatives are launched. And by the end of the day, the organization has committed to doing more things than it has resources, attention, or capability to deliver.
Six months later, nothing has moved. Not because people didn't work hard. But because everything competed equally for attention, nothing got the sustained investment it needed, and the strategy that looked ambitious on paper produced exactly nothing in practice.
This is what happens when an organization can't say no.
Strategy Is Not a To-Do List
Most strategic plans are wish lists. They contain everything the organization could pursue, organized by theme, decorated with timelines, and presented with enough confidence to satisfy a board.
What they don't contain is choices.
Strategy, at its core, is the discipline of choosing what to focus on and what to sacrifice. If you aren't saying "no" to some opportunities, you don't have a strategy. You have a list. And a list doesn't tell anyone what matters most, what gets resources first, or what to do when two good ideas compete for the same dollar.
Roger Martin puts it simply: strategy is an integrated set of choices that positions the organization to win. The word "choices" is doing all the work in that sentence. A choice that doesn't exclude anything isn't a choice. It's a platitude.
Why Organizations Can't Say No
Leaders resist trade-offs for understandable reasons.
Saying "no" disappoints stakeholders. It closes options. It feels risky: what if the opportunity you declined turns out to be the one that mattered? Leaders who say "yes" to everything appear inclusive and ambitious. Leaders who say "no" appear cautious or closed-minded.
And in many organizations, there's a structural incentive to avoid choices. When budgets are allocated based on historical precedent rather than strategic priority, nobody has to make hard decisions. Everyone gets their slice. Programs continue because they've always existed, not because they serve the organization's purpose. Initiatives accumulate because starting something new is exciting and stopping something old is painful.
The result is the Do-It-All Trap: an organization spread across too many priorities, doing nothing particularly well, with leadership teams so busy managing the volume that they never notice nothing is actually working.
What Happens When You Refuse to Choose
The consequences are specific and predictable:
Resources spread thin. Every initiative gets some funding, but none gets enough to succeed. The organization invests in everything at 60% and wonders why nothing produces results. The answer is obvious to everyone except the people allocating resources: partial investment produces partial outcomes, which produce zero impact.
Teams lack clarity. When everything is a priority, nothing is. People on the front line don't know what matters most, so they default to whatever feels most urgent or whatever their direct manager cares about. Strategy becomes a document that lives in a shared drive. Actual behavior is driven by proximity and politics.
The organization becomes reactive. Without criteria for distinguishing what's important from what's merely urgent, the loudest problem wins. Leaders spend their energy fighting fires and have none left for the work that creates long-term value. The strategic capabilities that would make the organization more resilient never get built, because building them doesn't feel urgent today.
The Strategy-Capability Gap widens. The organization commits to outcomes it doesn't have the capability to deliver, because nobody assessed whether the capabilities existed before making the commitment. New strategies are announced. The same old capabilities are expected to execute them. And when execution fails, it's blamed on "implementation" rather than on the absence of honest strategic choices.
"Where Not to Play" Is the Real Strategy
Every good strategy has two lists. The first is where you'll focus: which markets, which stakeholders, which capabilities, which bets. Most organizations can produce this list. It's energizing. It's aspirational. It looks good on a slide.
The second list is where you won't play. Which markets you'll exit. Which stakeholders you'll deprioritize. Which capabilities you'll stop investing in. Which existing programs you'll wind down.
This second list is where strategy actually lives. Because until you've named what you're giving up, you haven't made a real choice. You've just added new commitments on top of old ones and hoped the math would work.
Three tests for whether your "where not to play" decisions are real:
1. Are they specific? "We'll focus on fewer things" is not a trade-off. "We will not invest in general business programs where we have no employer demand advantage" is.
2. Do they free resources? A "no" that doesn't release budget, attention, or capacity isn't a real "no." It's a deferral. True trade-offs create space for the things that matter.
3. Do they make someone uncomfortable? If your exclusion list doesn't disappoint at least one stakeholder or leader, it's probably not cutting deep enough. The easy "no" decisions were already made. The ones that matter are the ones that hurt.
The 150-Word Test
Here's a practical test for whether your organization has a strategy or a wish list.
Can you write your strategy in 150 words or fewer?
Not a summary of your strategic plan. The actual strategy. What you exist to do. Where you'll focus. How you'll win. What you'll measure. In plain language that every employee could read and understand.
If you can do it, you've made real choices. The brevity forces trade-offs. You can't fit everything into 150 words, which means you have to decide what matters most.
If you can't do it, the problem isn't writing skill. It's that the choices haven't been made. A 50-page strategic plan that can't be reduced to 150 words isn't comprehensive. It's unfocused.
Try it. Write it down. Read it to a front-line employee. If they can tell you what it means for their work, you have a strategy. If they nod politely and go back to what they were already doing, you have a document.
Hypotheses, Not Plans
One more shift that changes everything: treat your strategy as a set of hypotheses, not a fixed plan.
Every strategic choice is an assumption:
- "We believe this stakeholder segment values this kind of service"
- "We believe this capability will give us an advantage"
- "We believe this market is viable given current conditions"
Traditional planning treats these assumptions as facts, decided once, executed over a multi-year horizon. When reality contradicts the plan, the organization faces an impossible choice: stick with the plan (which no longer fits) or abandon it (and improvise).
The alternative: treat each choice as a hypothesis to be tested. Run small experiments. Gather evidence. Update your assumptions. A strategy built on testable hypotheses doesn't collapse when the environment shifts. It adapts, because the organization is already in the habit of learning from evidence rather than defending a fixed position.
When evidence contradicts an assumption, that's not failure. That's learning. And an organization that learns faster than its environment changes is an organization that wins.
Start With One "No"
You don't need a full strategic overhaul to start. You need one honest "no."
Look at your current portfolio of initiatives, programs, or investments. Find the one that everyone knows isn't working but nobody will say out loud. The one that continues because it has always continued. The one that consumes resources without producing outcomes anyone can point to.
Name it. Evaluate it against your purpose: does it serve the reason this organization exists? Evaluate it against your stakeholders: are the people you exist to serve actually better off because of it?
If the answers are no, stop investing in it. Redirect those resources to something that matters.
One "no" won't transform your organization. But it will do something more important: it will prove that choosing is possible. And once a leadership team discovers it can say "no" and survive, the second one gets easier.
This post is drawn from Closing the Strategy-Execution Gap, a self-paced course that follows one institution through the discipline of making strategic choices, including the ones that hurt.