Keep, Redesign, Pause, Stop: A Planning Tool for Leadership Teams and Boards
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 default
Legacy work is hard to question because it’s personal. Someone built it. Someone loves it. Asking whether it should continue can feel like asking whether their work mattered.
So the conversation doesn’t happen, or it happens badly. One person says drop it, another defends it, and the item survives because no one wants to be the one who ended it. What’s missing is a neutral way to sort it.
The four options
I use four categories with boards and leadership teams.
Keep. It’s working well and the return is good.
Redesign. Good concept, but the current execution isn’t working. It needs
changes to continue.
Pause. There isn’t enough data to make an informed decision. Gather it first.
Stop. It isn’t delivering value relative to the resources invested.
The words matter less than what they do to the room. When the only choices are keep or kill, people defend. When redesign and pause are on the table, people start talking about what the thing is for.
How to run it with your team
List everything that recurs. Events, meetings, reports, programs, services. If it shows up on the calendar or in the budget every year, it goes on the list.
Write down what each one costs. Dollars, and the hours of the people who carry it. The hours are the number most teams have never added up.
Write down what each one returns. Revenue, members, relationships, whatever it exists to produce. If nobody can say what it’s for, that’s your answer.
Sort as a group. Each item gets one of the four. Disagreement is fine. Name it, decide, and move to the next item.
Give every pause an owner, a date and a question. Who is leading this exploration, what do you need to know, and when will you decide? A pause without these is a stop nobody wanted to announce.
Tell people about every stop. The people who built it deserve to hear why from you, and to be thanked for it.
What it looks like in the room
This spring I walked a board through this with their long-running annual event. The first answer in the room was keep. It had history, it had a following, and nobody wanted to touch it.
Then we looked at who it served and who it left out. The format worked for the people who already came to the event. It gave everyone else very little reason to be there. Within a few minutes the conversation wasn’t about keeping or cutting it. It was about what it would take to make it work for more of the people it was supposed to serve.
That’s a redesign conversation, and it’s a better one than the room would have had with only two options.
Redesign deserves more attention than stop
Stop gets the attention because it feels decisive. Redesign is often where the value is. It keeps what people valued and fixes what wasn’t working.
Treat a redesigned program the way you’d treat anything new. Give it an end date and check whether it landed. Then run it back through the four words next year.
Before anything new goes on next year’s plan
The plan for next year will get written in the next few weeks. Before you add to it, run what’s already there through these four words. You’ll find capacity you didn’t know you had.
If your leadership team or board wants an outside facilitator for that discussion, let’s have a conversation about what your organization needs.
Find the real problem. Do the real work. Build what lasts.
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