Carried, Not Chosen: The Commitments Your Strategy Has Outgrown

Every leadership team can name the strategy. Fewer can name what the organisation is still doing because it always has. Between the two sits a gap that widens quietly, one committee, one monthly return and one legacy approval at a time. The plan is rarely the problem. The load is.

A useful way to think about this comes from the hill: the pack that suited a three-hour approach is not the pack for a long ridge day. Nothing in it is rubbish. It was chosen, once, for conditions that have since changed. The discipline is not ruthless stripping; it is honest weighing. The same applies to a strategy that has matured.

Why Nothing Ever Leaves

Commitments accumulate because adding is cheap and removing is expensive. Adding a reporting line costs a template. Removing one costs a conversation with someone who believes they commissioned it. Adding a steering group costs a diary invitation. Closing one costs an explanation to a sponsor, and possibly to a board.

So the asymmetry holds. Organisations therefore tend to arrive at their current portfolio not by design but by accretion — a sedimentary record of past anxieties, past restructures and past sponsors with particular enthusiasms.

Two Different Kinds of Silt

UK public-sector and scale-up teams both accumulate load, but not in the same way, and it helps to name the difference before auditing.

In public bodies — local authorities, NHS trusts, arm's-length bodies and their sponsoring departments — much of the weight is legitimate. Statutory duties, accounting officer assurances, freedom of information obligations, equality reporting and grantholder conditions are not optional. The difficulty is that custom accretes around obligation: the statutory return grows a commentary, the commentary grows a slide pack, the slide pack grows a monthly meeting. The distinction worth drawing is between the floor — what the law, the contract or the funding agreement actually requires — and the ceiling, which is everything the organisation has built on top of it and now treats as though it were law.

In scale-ups, the pattern is inverted. Load arrives through relationships: the enterprise customer whose service agreement was bespoke, the investor reporting pack designed for a Series A that no longer describes the business, the founder promise made in year one and never revisited. Nothing here is statutory, so nothing here is safe by default — and nothing here is automatically removable either, because each item has a person behind it.

Four Tests, Scored Simply

The practical work is a single page: every recurring commitment — committee, report, metric, approval, review — listed once, with a named owner. Then each item is scored 0, 1 or 2 on four questions.

• Contribution. Does it move a priority the strategy currently names? Two for a clear line to a stated priority; one for an indirect or arguable link; zero for none anyone can articulate.
• Decision value. Does the output change a decision someone actually takes? Two if a named decision follows; one if it informs without deciding; zero if the honest answer is that no one reads it.
• Attention cost. Two if it takes little senior time; one if moderate; zero if it consumes director-level hours, preparation and follow-up disproportionate to its yield. Scored this way, a high total is good.
• Obligation. Two if statutory, contractual or funder-mandated and documented as such; one if customary but supported by an agreement; zero if inherited habit with no instrument behind it.

Out of eight, the bands are straightforward. Seven or eight: keep and protect — these are load-bearing. Five or six: redesign, usually by reducing frequency, shortening the artefact or moving the decision lower. Three or four: place on notice with a named owner and a review date. Zero to two: retire, subject to a single check that no obligation is hiding underneath.

The scoring is not the point. Its value is that it forces a team to disagree in the open about the same item using the same language, rather than trading impressions.

Running It Without a Tribunal

Two practical notes. First, the owner speaks before the sponsor. If the sponsor of an item opens the discussion, the room adjusts around their enthusiasm, and the audit becomes a negotiation rather than a review. Second, include the items nobody owns. An unowned commitment is usually either genuinely finished or a risk in waiting, and both findings matter.

It is also worth inviting one person from outside the leadership team — a finance lead, a programme director, a non-executive — whose role is to ask what a given report is for. Insiders stop being able to hear that question honestly.

The Stopping Conversation

Retiring something is a leadership act, not an administrative one, and it needs a named decision-maker, a date and a route to the people affected. Where obligations apply, agree the statutory minimum and speak to the sponsor or regulator before announcing anything publicly; nobody is well served by a surprise. Where the item is merely customary, say plainly that it is ending, who has agreed it, and what will replace it in the calendar.

Expect one or two objections on principle. They are usually about assurance rather than the artefact, and the answer is normally to offer a lighter assurance rather than to restore the pack.

Keeping the Weight Off

Load returns unless the governance resists it. Three modest devices help. A sunset clause on every new committee and recurring report, stated at the point of creation. A one-in, one-out convention for senior reporting. And a single standing question at each quarterly review: what are we carrying now that we did not choose this year?

That question, asked reliably, does more for strategic clarity than most planning cycles. A team that knows what it has deliberately put down tends to know, rather more sharply, what it has deliberately picked up.