I’ve sat in strategy days where the room fills a wall with whiteboards by lunch.
Every idea goes up. Every initiative gets its own box, its own owner, its own next step. The energy is real, the people are engaged, the thinking is good.
By the end of the day the list is longer than it was at the start, and everyone leaves feeling that something happened.
Then a few weeks later you look, and the dial hasn’t moved.
What strikes me about those days isn’t what gets added. It’s that nothing ever comes off.
The whole day is built around putting more on the list. Not once does anyone ask what the business should stop doing, or which of these things was never going to matter.
Deleting isn’t on the agenda.
Adding is the agenda.
The same leaders in that room can almost always tell me the two or three things that would actually change their business.
I ask, and the answer comes back without much thought, because they already know.
They’ve known for a while.
So the knowing isn’t the problem.
That’s the part that surprised me when I first started noticing it. These aren’t leaders who lack clarity about what matters. They can name it faster than I can write it down.
The gap isn’t between them and the answer. It’s between the answer and where they spend themselves, and that gap is stable.
It doesn’t close on its own, even when the leader is capable, ambitious, and entirely sincere about wanting the result.
There’s a pattern underneath this, and once you’ve seen it you start seeing it everywhere.
In most systems a small number of things carry most of the result.
It has a name, Price’s Law.
In 1963 a physicist called Derek Price found that in most fields the square root of the people produce about half the work. It holds in more places than you’d expect.
On a team of a hundred, around ten people carry half the output.
Of everything on the strategy wall, a handful sets most of the direction.
Across a full week, a few hours move more than all the rest put together.
Of the forty things that went up on that wall, maybe six will carry the year.
The rest isn’t wasted. It keeps the thing running, but it isn’t what produces the outcome.
Most leaders sense this long before they’ll say it out loud. It’s why the wall can feel hollow even while it’s filling up.
So why doesn’t the leader move their week, and their strategy day, toward the few things they’ve already named.
Not because they don’t understand the pattern. They understand their own business far better than I do.
What I bring isn’t a better grasp of it. It’s the mirror they can’t hold up to themselves, and it points somewhere they don’t often look on their own.
There’s a way of seeing this as a sequence.
In anything new you start by exploring. You try things, you take shots, you gather results, because you can’t know in advance which of them will land.
Once enough results are in, you identify. You read them for the signal and find the few that carried the rest.
Then you exploit. You put your weight behind those few and let the others go.
The businesses I work with are large, and most of them are long past the exploring stage. They’ve been running for decades.
Every shot has been taken. The results are all in, sitting in the numbers, in the reports, in what everyone already half-knows.
If anything they have too much data, not too little.
What they skip is the middle. They don’t stop to read which of it mattered.
So they keep taking new shots, filling new walls, running the next strategy day, when the signal from everything they’ve already done is right there unread.
They act as if they’re still in the early game, gathering, when the work they actually need is identification, and without it there’s nothing to double down on, because they never named what was worth doubling down on.
Not reading the signal isn’t an oversight. It’s the same agreement, moved one step earlier.
If you never identify which six of the forty carried the year, you never have to cut the other thirty-four. Looking would force the choice.
So the not-looking protects the leader from the choosing, the same way the full wall does.
To concentrate on the few, you have to let the rest go.
You have to choose a small number of bets and put your weight behind them, which means being the person who chose.
If you stay across everything, you never have to.
You can keep every initiative alive, stay close to every part of the business, and answer for all of it, and it feels like diligence. It feels like the responsible thing.
Being everywhere reads as commitment, to the board, to the team, and to yourself as well.
The agreement stays unsaid because each piece of it sounds so reasonable.
“It’s too early to cut this one.” “Let’s keep it on the list for now.” “I want to stay close to that one myself.” “If I let this go and it falls over, that’s on me.”
Every line sounds like care and good judgement. Put together, across a whole wall, they are how the choosing never happens.
Underneath the reasonable lines there’s an agreement. If I keep everything alive, I can’t be caught out.
As long as I never concentrate, I never have to find out whether the few things I’d have chosen were the right ones, and I’m never the one who let something fall.
Go one layer down and it isn’t really about being caught out. It’s about worth.
If I concentrate and I’m wrong, I don’t just lose a bet. I lose the story that I’m the one who has all of this handled.
Breadth keeps that story intact.
It’s easier to stay across everything and stretched thin than to choose a few things and find out what I’m actually made of.
Here’s what that agreement costs, and it’s the part that’s hard to sit with.
The breadth the leader is protecting was mostly maintenance to begin with. The safety comes from staying spread across work that was never going to produce the result.
So the thing that feels most responsible turns out to be the thing keeping the result out of reach.
The leader hasn’t traded the outcome for nothing. They’ve traded it for the feeling of not having chosen.
It doesn’t stop with the leader.
A team watches where their leader puts their attention and takes it as the instruction.
If everything stays alive at the top, everything stays alive below. The organisation learns to spread itself the same way and calls it being thorough.
The pattern the leader is living becomes the pattern the whole business runs on.
The reframe is smaller than it sounds. Concentrating on the few isn’t a retreat from the job. It is the job.
The discomfort that comes with the cull, the exposure of having chosen, is the actual cost of the step change the leader keeps saying they want.
There’s no version where they get the bigger result and keep the safety of being across everything.
Fewer, bigger, better is just Price’s Law enacted on purpose, and the hard part of it was never the strategy. It was the willingness to choose and to live with having chosen.
So the question I’d leave you with isn’t which things to cut. You already know which things matter, the same way the leaders I meet already know.
The question underneath it is a different one.
Which things are you keeping alive so you don’t have to choose? What would you have to find out about yourself if you finally did?
Give yourself the gift of you.
Love Glin x
A note before you go.
This is the kind of question I sit with leaders on inside the Expansion Room, a live space where we do this work in real time rather than on the page. I started it as a three-month experiment, six sessions to see what it became. Three are left. After that I'm deciding whether it returns, and in what form.
I think it's a space worth protecting, so if it's been on your mind, this is the moment to come in.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.