The Overcommitment Trap
Too many priorities, too little capacity, and one very good barnacle metaphor
The barnacles are winning. Here’s what to do about it.
This week’s Musings is basically a love letter to capacity — protecting it, respecting it, and not letting a thousand little barnacles eat it alive. We’ve also got a fascinating new voice worth following, a quote that probably should have stopped a lot of bad meetings before they started, and something that will make you smile.
Cheers,
Kevin
FEATURED MUSING
Strategy execution fails in predictable ways. Over the next six weeks, I’ll explore six traps nested inside the larger Strategy Trap. These are patterns that consistently derail even well-designed strategies, and what to do about each one.
Part 3 of 6
“We’re just going to have to build the plane while we’re flying it.”
If you’ve said that—or heard it said—with a straight face, you’ve probably been in the Overcommitment Trap. The phrase gets treated as a rallying cry, or more concerning, as a badge of honor. But think about what it actually means. Nobody on a real plane would find that reassuring. Neither does your team.
The Overcommitment Trap is what happens when a leadership team keeps adding new priorities without taking anything off the plate. A new initiative here, a strategic pivot there, a “this is really important and we need to move fast” every quarter. Each one is justified in the moment. But taken together, they bury the organization under more work than anyone can actually execute well. Something always gives, and all too often it’s the work that matters most. Or the people who matter most.
What It Looks Like in Practice
The team is working harder than ever, but the most important things aren’t getting done. There’s no shortage of effort. Everyone is busy. But progress on the strategic priorities keeps getting pushed by urgent work that fills every available hour.
Everything is a high priority. The organization probably has a long list of initiatives sorted into high, medium, and low buckets with an overwhelming number in the high bucket, a handful in medium, and almost nothing in low. While that’s technically prioritization, it’s not effective because it leaves people to figure out on their own what actually comes first when two high priorities compete for the same time and attention.
New initiatives keep starting without anything stopping. The organization develops a kind of initiative debt—a growing list of efforts in flight consuming attention and energy, dividing the team and limiting the ability to do any of it well. People work harder and harder and still can’t point to what they’ve actually accomplished. When you’re spread across too many things, you make incremental progress on everything and meaningful progress on nothing.
“We’ll figure it out” is a recurring answer to resource questions. This is kicking the can down the road rather than making the hard call in the present. When the plan relies on people finding time they don’t have, the plan probably isn’t executable, and saying “we’ll figure it out” just hands that problem to people who have even less context for solving it.
A Few Questions Worth Considering
If you listed everything your organization is working on right now, how many items would be on that list, and how many of those are moving forward in a meaningful way?
When someone on your team has to choose between a strategic priority and something urgent, what do they probably do, and does the answer reflect what you’d want?
If a new initiative landed on your desk tomorrow, what would come off the plate to make room for it? If the answer is nothing, that’s worth thinking through and making some choices.
When you last set priorities, did you stack-rank them—as in, there is one #1, one #2, etc.—or did you end up with a group of initiatives all roughly tied for most important?
Have you communicated clearly to your team what you’re choosing not to do, and why?
What To Do About It
The antidote has two parts that work together.
The first is making explicit space by deciding what to stop, defer, or cut before adding anything new. A stop-doing list is just as important as a priority list, and in many organizations it probably needs to come first.
The second is stack-ranking your priorities for real: one is first, two is second, so when there’s a conflict, people know which one wins. A list of equally weighted priorities just moves the hard decisions down to the people least equipped to make them.
Creating capacity is about making deliberate choices about where the hours you have actually go. That’s harder than it sounds, because it requires saying no to things that are genuinely good ideas—just not the right ideas right now.
If you want to go deeper on how to build a stop-doing list, run a stack-ranking process, and create real capacity for your most important work, I cover the tools and techniques in detail in The Strategy Trap.
CAPACITY
Your Business has Barnacles. Time to Scrape.
I love this TikTok from the most amazing Tamara Adlin, where she uses a simple metaphor around ships accumulating barnacles one at a time, each one harmless on its own, until there’s enough drag to slow the whole vessel down. She applies it to websites that make small additions that pile up until the user experience is a mess. But the same thing eats capacity in our businesses. Every recurring task, report, meeting, or process that gets added and never removed is a barnacle. Individually, no big deal. Collectively, they’re probably what’s slowing your team down more than anything else.
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
It’s not about how much time you have. It’s about what you do with it.
I really like this article from James Stanier because he makes a distinction that’s easy to miss: managing your time and managing your capacity aren’t the same thing. You can fill every hour and still accomplish very little if the quality of that time is low. That goes double for leaders. Overschedule yourself and you’ve essentially committed the Overcommitment Trap on yourself where you have no room to think, no room to coach, and no room to handle unexpected problems. I wrote about something similar in my post on the immense value of slop time. Protecting your own capacity isn’t a luxury.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.”
— often attributed to Josh Billings
INTERESTING
The midlife crisis is so last century
My friend Sky Kelley just launched her new newsletter, The Becoming Economy, and her first post really got me thinking. Her argument is that people aren’t just evolving anymore, they’re changing their identities — repeatedly — and that’s becoming a normal part of modern life, not a rare disruption. The implications for businesses are huge. If your customers are fundamentally different people than they were three years ago, a strategy built around who they used to be probably isn’t going to work. Worth a read, and I can’t wait to see where she takes this.
😀 AND NOW...YOUR MOMENT OF HAPPINESS 😀
My Amazon #1 bestselling book, The Strategy Trap: Why Companies Fail at Execution and How to Get It Right, is now available!
If you’ve ever struggled to turn team agreement into consistent action, the book goes deep on how to fix that—with practical tools, real-world stories, and a framework for turning strategy into results. If you know someone who wrestles with the gap between plan and execution, please forward this along.
When you say yes to something, you are saying no to everything else!
Leaders and managers need to understand this before the dish out even more tasks!
Thanks for the nod, Kevin! A shout-out like that coming from a Best-selling author means so much!