Every organization carries things nobody decided to keep. An annual event. A monthly report. A standing meeting. A program someone launched years ago that still runs because it has always run. None of them were bad ideas. Most earned their place once. The trouble is that nobody has asked whether they still do. In planning season that matters, because every one of them is spending time, money and attention you’re about to promise to something new. Why the old things win by def

Every fall, leadership teams sit down to build next year's plan. The thinking is usually good. People disagree well. The whiteboard fills up. And by spring, a lot of those plans look like the plan from the year before. That isn't a thinking problem. It comes from how the plan got built. Most plans are built by addition: the team decides what it wants and writes it down, one reasonable item at a time. Five signs your plan was built by addition The same items show up two years

Watch a leadership team set priorities for the year and you will see a well-run process. Discussion. Debate. Real thought about what matters. A short list at the end, usually 3 or 4 priorities, and genuine commitment to it. Now watch the same team a year later. The list of the work that was prioritized has five things on it. Nobody remembers when the fourth and fifth arrived, and nobody removed anything to make room. That is the subtraction problem, and it is nearly universal

Ask a leader how they ended up spending their week and you will not hear about a mistake. You will hear about a sequence of reasonable decisions. A client needed something adjacent to what the company does, and the revenue was real, so they took it. Someone left and the gap got covered from the top, just until they hired, and then hiring got hard or training the new person got pushed off because of ‘busy.’ A customer asked for something and it became a product line nobody wan