If your strategy doesn’t tell you what not to do, it is not an effective strategy.
Because saying yes to things is the easy part. In fact I believe it has never been easier for businesses to think they can take on more and more.
But the amount of human attention we have is finite. Switching focus takes cognitive effort. Increasing stakeholders has a quadratic impact on the number of new relationships to manage.
Straddling strategies (doing both, or many things) doesn’t evenly reduce the time for each. It fragments it, the overhead multiplies disproportionately and the depth decreases.
So if we want to have impact in our work then we have to choose.
And so that we don’t have to do the hard work of choosing each time, we write a strategy. It saves us from having to renegotiate our priority every week.
Which means, if your strategy isn’t clearly telling you what not to do, it isn’t doing its job. Instead, it’s pushing that hard work downstream, forcing you to decide every day, creating extra effort and reducing impact.
Strategy does the hard work of saying no to make it easier for you to focus on having impact every day.