The symptom
Consider an organisation where a strategic objective appears in every quarterly update marked amber. It has been amber for four quarters running. On paper, this reads as a difficult but active piece of work — something the organisation is still pushing on, still tracking, still committed to.
Look at who is actually spending time on it and the picture changes. No named individual has time formally allocated to the objective. It has an executive sponsor, whose role is to champion it at leadership level, but no owner responsible for the day-to-day work of moving it forward. Everyone involved in the quarterly review broadly assumes someone, somewhere, is working on it. Nobody is, in any sustained way.
The amber status itself is part of what allows this to persist unchallenged for so long. Amber signals “in progress, some concern” — a status that invites patience rather than scrutiny. A status of red would likely have triggered an intervention considerably sooner. Amber, precisely because it sits in the comfortable middle, can sit unchanged for quarter after quarter without ever crossing the threshold that would force someone to ask the harder question of whether the objective is actually moving at all.
What leaders usually conclude
The first explanation offered is usually that the work itself is difficult, and difficult work moves slowly. That’s a fair possibility and shouldn’t be dismissed — some initiatives genuinely are hard and genuinely do take longer than a quarterly cadence would like. But it doesn’t explain four consecutive quarters of identical amber status with no material change in what’s blocking it. Genuinely hard work usually shows some visible movement, even slow movement. Unresourced work shows the same status quarter after quarter because nothing is actually happening to change it.
There’s a useful test for telling these apart, even without knowing the detail of the work itself: ask what specifically changed since the last update. Genuinely difficult work, even moving slowly, usually has an answer — a blocker identified, an approach tried and adjusted, a partial result achieved. Work that’s simply unresourced tends to produce the same answer every time, because the same nobody has been working on it every quarter. The specificity of the answer, more than the pace of progress it describes, is often the more reliable signal.
What the evidence suggests
This connects to research from Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat, published in what is now MIT Sloan Management Review, on what they termed the “silent killers” of strategy implementation. Among the barriers they identified as mutually reinforcing was the coexistence of unclear strategy and conflicting priorities — organisations that declare something a priority at the leadership level without the accompanying reallocation of capacity that would make it real at the working level. An executive sponsor can genuinely believe in an initiative’s importance and still not be the person positioned to free up the hours it needs, particularly if doing so means taking capacity away from something more immediately measurable.
This is worth distinguishing from a simple lack of enthusiasm. In many cases the sponsor remains genuinely committed to the initiative throughout — championing it in leadership meetings, defending its inclusion on the roadmap, expressing real frustration at its lack of progress. None of that enthusiasm converts into allocated working time unless something in the organisation’s resourcing process specifically forces the trade-off between this priority and whatever else is competing for the same people. Sponsorship and resourcing can run on entirely separate tracks, each looking healthy in isolation, for longer than most leadership teams would expect.
The deeper pattern here is that declaring something a priority and resourcing it are different acts, performed by different people, at different points in the organisational hierarchy — and it’s entirely possible for the first to happen without the second following. A priority without allocated capacity functions as a statement of intent rather than a plan. It signals what the organisation values without committing what the organisation would need to spend to actually get there. Everyone around the table can honestly agree the objective matters and still, collectively, not have resourced it — because agreeing it matters and deciding whose time it costs are separate decisions, and only one of them happened.
This has a specific consequence for how initiatives compete with each other over time. Resourced work tends to produce visible output, which tends to attract further resourcing, in a mild but real reinforcing cycle. Unresourced work produces no visible output, which gives leadership no particular reason to prioritise resourcing it over whatever is currently producing results — even if the unresourced initiative is, on paper, the more strategically important of the two. Momentum, in this sense, tends to follow existing resourcing rather than existing importance.
Looking for your own sector? The Other Sectors page points to the closest match.
Questions worth considering
- What is the difference, in this organisation, between something being declared a priority and something being resourced as one?
- Of the initiatives currently marked amber, how many have a named individual with allocated time against them, rather than an executive sponsor and an assumption?
- How would leadership actually notice the difference between an initiative that’s genuinely hard and one that’s simply uncosted?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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