The symptom
A strategy document approves five, six, sometimes more strategic initiatives for the year ahead. Each one, read individually, is well-justified — a genuine opportunity, backed by a reasonable business case, sponsored by someone senior enough to make the case credibly. The organisation then discovers, partway through the year, that it doesn’t have the capacity to properly resource all of them at once. The same specialist skill sets get pulled between two or three initiatives simultaneously. Senior leadership time, in particular, becomes the scarcest resource of all, split across more competing priorities than any calendar can reasonably hold.
Each individual sponsor, meanwhile, has no obvious way of knowing this is happening. From where they sit, they secured approval for a good idea and were told the organisation supports it — which is true, in the narrow sense that nobody withdrew support. What they can’t easily see is how many other sponsors received the same reassurance, for initiatives drawing on the same limited pool of specialist time.
What leaders usually conclude
The instinctive response is that the organisation needs more capacity — more hires, more budget, more specialist resource to go around. Sometimes that’s a fair conclusion. But it treats the volume of initiatives as fixed and the resourcing as the variable to solve for, when the more uncomfortable possibility is that the organisation approved more initiatives than it was ever going to be able to resource properly, and nobody was specifically positioned to say so at the point of approval.
Adding capacity, when the underlying issue is approval volume, tends to produce a temporary improvement followed by a return to the same condition — because the approval process that let too many initiatives through the first time is still in place, unchanged, ready to approve the next round at the new, larger capacity level. The relief is real but usually short-lived, since nothing about how initiatives get approved has actually changed.
What the evidence suggests
Steven Kerr’s research on reward systems, published in the Academy of Management Journal, offers a relevant lens here, even though it wasn’t written about resource allocation specifically. Kerr’s finding was that organisations consistently reward one set of behaviours while stating they hope for a different one, and that people respond reliably to what’s actually rewarded. Applied to competing initiatives, the pattern is similar: initiatives that are individually measured, individually sponsored and individually defended tend to attract resource, almost regardless of how that resourcing interacts with everything else competing for the same people. Nothing in most performance or budgeting systems measures the aggregate load across initiatives — each initiative’s business case is evaluated on its own terms, and the sum of several sound individual cases can still exceed what the organisation can actually deliver.
This connects to a broader theme in decision-rights research. Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko’s Bain study, published in Harvard Business Review, found decision-making stalling at recurring structural points — including, notably, where a decision needs joint ownership across functions rather than sitting cleanly within one. Deciding which initiatives should proceed and which should wait, when several individually reasonable sponsors are each advocating for their own, is exactly this kind of decision — one that requires authority spanning multiple sponsors’ territory, which is precisely the kind of decision most organisations are least well-equipped to make cleanly.
The consequence isn’t usually that every initiative fails — it’s that most of them proceed, slowly and partially, consuming resource without any one of them getting the concentrated attention that would let it actually move at the pace its business case assumed. An organisation can end a year having formally supported every initiative it approved and genuinely completed relatively few, because approval was never the constraint. Capacity, allocated across too many simultaneous claims, was.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- Was the current set of strategic initiatives ever evaluated together, as a set competing for the same finite resources — or only individually, each against its own business case?
- Is there a point in the organisation with the standing to say no to a well-justified initiative, on the grounds that something else already has a claim on the same capacity?
- If two initiatives are quietly drawing on the same specialist team right now, would anyone currently see that clearly, or would it only surface once both are already behind schedule?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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