Extraordinary Effort Is Not a Strategy

I came to this realization through burnout a few years ago. There is a limit to what one person can accomplish by working longer or pushing harder. Bringing more people into the work increases capacity, but it leaves an essential question unanswered: are we concentrating that capacity on the right things?

I admire hard work and a sense of urgency. Both are part of how I work. But when results fall short, the response is often to increase activity. Missed sales targets lead to more prospecting. A product that struggles to sell gets more features. Declining social engagement prompts more posts.

Any of those responses might help. The difficulty is knowing whether they address the underlying challenge. That requires time to understand what is happening, identify the opportunities and constraints, and decide how the work should fit together. Under pressure, that time can feel hardest to justify.

Making the choices visible

In a planning exercise with business leaders, we examined how to balance an established business with newer opportunities. Each opportunity can have a reasonable case behind it. Together, however, they compete for attention and for the capacity of shared teams.

I created a visual system that put the elements of the business plan in plain sight. With priorities arranged from low to high, I added a slider called “Business Focus.” Moving it toward the higher priorities narrowed the work receiving focus. I asked the leaders to place it where the organization could realistically execute.

Then I added a second slider: “Marketing Focus.” It had to sit farther toward the high-priority end because marketing had less capacity than the broader business could put behind its opportunities. Several sales teams might pursue different offerings, while drawing on the same marketing team.

Both sliders used the same priorities. The second made the limits of a shared function visible. An opportunity could matter to the business without receiving the same level of marketing attention as its highest priorities.

This helped us establish a clearer focus. The visual gave us a concrete way to discuss choices that urgency alone could not resolve.

Making the activities reinforce each other

Narrowing the priorities was only part of the strategic work. The next question was how the remaining opportunities might strengthen the chosen direction.

For example, an emerging offering might have a low priority as a standalone business. Yet customers in a priority segment may already need it alongside the core offering. Addressing those needs together could make the overall proposition more useful and support the main business objective.

We are exploring that connection and it changes the question from how to create another separate campaign to how an offering might strengthen work already central to the business.

That is what I mean by strategy: understanding the challenge, making deliberate choices, and connecting activities so they amplify each other. A collection of individually worthwhile tasks does not automatically form a strategy.

Giving the thinking a purpose

Time spent on strategy should produce decisions people can use: which outcomes matter most, which opportunities deserve attention, what can wait, and how the selected activities support one another. Those decisions give teams a basis for acting, coordinating, and adjusting as they learn.

The work still takes effort. People still need to move with urgency and follow through. Strategy gives that effort a better chance of producing the intended result within the capacity the organization actually has.

Before asking people for extraordinary effort, we should be clear about what deserves it and how their contributions will work together.