Everyone agreed on the priorities. Nobody stopped the other 800 things.

We knew something was wrong before we could prove it.

Decisions were slow. The same escalations kept landing with the same people. The leadership team was working flat out and the business was still moving slower than it should.

So we did a project amnesty.

Every active piece of work across the organisation — named, owned, brought into the open. No hiding, no protecting your patch. Just an honest picture of what the business was actually doing.

The number was 800.

800 live projects in an organisation of 40,000 people. Each with owners, timelines and resource attached. Each consuming leadership attention, decision-making energy and senior time.

The executive team had just finished a prioritisation exercise. Twelve strategic priorities. Clearly defined, properly sequenced, board-signed-off.

The 800 were still running underneath it.

Nobody had said stop. Nobody had worked out what stopping would actually require. Nobody had done the capacity maths.

A priority list without a capacity decision is not a strategy. It is a wish list with a PowerPoint behind it.

So we made a different decision.

Instead of another prioritisation exercise, we did the capacity work. We took the 800, challenged every single one, and built the first annual operating plan the organisation had ever had. Sixty projects. Named, resourced, owned.

The other 740 were stopped, paused or absorbed.

It sounds brutal. It was actually a relief.

Because the moment the 800 became 60, something shifted. The strategic priorities that had been sitting on a slide for six months started to move. Not because the strategy had changed. Not because we hired more people. Because the leadership team finally had the headroom to actually lead them.

Priority without capacity is not a strategy. It is pressure with better labelling.

Here is what I see consistently in leadership teams under pressure.

Prioritisation gets treated as a strategy problem. Which list do we choose? How do we sequence it? What does the framework say?

Not bad questions. But the wrong starting point.

Because the real question is not: what are our priorities?

It is: what are we actually stopping — so that the people responsible for delivering the priorities have the headroom to do it?

That question is harder. It requires someone to say no to something that has a sponsor, a budget line and a believer. It requires the leadership team to hold that decision — not just make it once in a workshop and move on.

And here is where it always breaks down.

The list gets made. The session ends. People go back to their desks.

The 800 are still there. The escalations still land with the same three people. The leaders who were supposed to be executing the priorities are still fielding decisions that should have been resolved elsewhere.

Three weeks later, everything is a priority again. Two new things have been added. The leadership team is working harder than ever on a list that no longer reflects what the business is actually doing.

The organisations that break this pattern do not do better prioritisation exercises.

They do the capacity work first.

They get honest about what the business is actually running. They make the stop decision — properly, with the leadership team behind it. They redesign where time, decisions and focus are sitting so that when the list is set, it can actually be delivered.

That is a different intervention. And it is the one that makes the priorities move.

I work with senior leadership teams in PE-backed and board-governed organisations to reclaim leadership capacity and accelerate delivery. If this is landing for you, the Leadership Capacity Accelerator is running this spring — details at connectedpeace.co.uk