The Discipline of Discarding: Why Deciding What NOT to Do is Critically Important for Strategy
- Martin Haley | Normaraties Limited
- Jun 6
- 3 min read
Organisations pour significant effort into defining ambitious strategies, outlining where they want to go and how they intend to get there. Yet, the path from strategic design to successful delivery is often fraught with difficulty, with many strategies failing to achieve their intended outcomes. While poor execution is frequently cited as the culprit, the seeds of strategy failure can be sown much earlier. One fundamental, yet often overlooked, element critical to effective strategy is the discipline of deciding what the organisation will not do.
Strategy, at its core, involves making choices. It's not simply an additive process of listing everything the organisation could do. Rather, it's about defining a specific path, which inherently means limiting the scope of activities and focusing effort. Several sources underscore this crucial point: strategy is about deciding what not to do as much as what to do.
Ignoring the necessity of making these explicit "not-to-do" decisions can undermine the entire strategic effort in several critical ways:
Ensuring Focus and Avoiding Overreach: Without clearly defining what is outside the strategic scope, organisations risk spreading their resources – time, money, and people – too thinly. Strategic discussions can devolve into a "laundry list" of initiatives rather than a coherent course of action. Strategy needs to be simple and focused, and deciding what not to do helps achieve this necessary concentration of effort. You could gain more of one thing, but inevitably, you will get less of another; you simply cannot do both.
Confronting Necessary Trade-offs: Effective strategies require hard choices, not necessarily consensus. These choices inevitably involve trade-offs. For instance, an emphasis on decreasing product cost might empower the manufacturing function, while a focus on innovation shifts influence towards R&D. These differences in priorities can lead to conflict among the top management team. Many top teams unfortunately "hide their differences rather than confront hard trade-offs directly". Explicitly deciding what not to do forces these trade-offs into the open, enabling the leadership team to align on priorities and avoid the "silent killer" of unclear strategy and conflicting priorities. Leaders must possess the ability to say no where necessary.
Promoting Internal Alignment and Coherence: Strategy failure can arise from internal inconsistencies where what the organisation does is at odds with what it says it will do. Trying to pursue too many conflicting objectives, or failing to stop activities that are incompatible with the new direction, leads to internal friction and incongruence. Deciding what not to do clarifies priorities and helps ensure that strategic choices reinforce each other. For employees to effectively implement the strategy, they must know how to do their job differently, which inherently involves stopping old ways of working that no longer align with the strategic direction.
Freeing Up Resources and Enabling Action: Holding onto legacy activities, initiatives, or ways of working that are not aligned with the strategy consumes valuable resources. Checking ongoing initiatives before committing to new ones is a recommended guiding principle, and strategic initiatives should be continuously reviewed with an eye to consolidating or eliminating those not delivering strategic benefits. The discipline of deciding what not to do is essential for releasing the capacity needed to invest in and execute the activities that are strategically important.
In essence, deciding what not to do is not a mere footnote in the strategy process; it is a foundational requirement. It is the discipline that brings focus, enables crucial trade-offs, fosters internal alignment, and liberates the resources needed to turn strategic intent into reality. Without this critical step, strategy risks remaining an elegant but ultimately ineffective document, unable to leave its necessary mark on the business.
