Stopping Should Become Part of Strategy
Less but Better Week 4
By Rick Aman on“The antidote [to a chaotic world] is the disciplined pursuit of less.” — Greg McKeown
By Week 4, I planned for this series to move from diagnosis into disciplined action. In the earlier articles, I focused on why organizations accumulate work, how good programs can outlive their usefulness, and how organizational clutter consumes capacity. This week, I want to move from recognizing the problem to doing something about it.
In my experience, most planning conversations are built around addition. We ask what new initiative should be launched, what service should be expanded, or what new opportunity should be pursued. Those are reasonable questions, but they are only half of the strategic conversation. Far less often do we ask what should end. That imbalance matters. Organizations do not usually become overextended because of one bad decision. They become overextended through years of reasonable additions with very little subtraction. Each new activity may have made sense when it began. A committee solved a problem. A program met an emerging need. A new meeting improved coordination. But when those activities remain in place indefinitely, they begin to accumulate.
Over time, the organization begins to carry more weight. The strategic plan expands. Employees are asked to support more initiatives. Leaders spend more time coordinating activity and less time thinking strategically. Eventually, capacity becomes stretched, not because people are unwilling to work, but because the organization has not been disciplined about deciding what no longer deserves attention.
Stopping should become a normal part of board retreats, executive planning, budgeting, and strategic conversations rather than being reserved for moments of crisis or financial distress. Healthy organizations should routinely ask not only what they want to begin, but what they are willing to end. That is not negative thinking; it is stewardship.
The Hidden Weight of Recurring Work
When leaders think about stopping, they often focus first on programs. Programs are visible and tangible. They have budgets, staff, outcomes, and constituencies. But much of the clutter inside organizations is less obvious. It lives in recurring work that has gradually become permanent.
During my years as a college senior leadership, I saw how easily routine activities became institutionalized. A report might be created for one board discussion and then continue for years. A committee might be formed around a temporary challenge and slowly become part of the organizational structure. A weekly meeting may have been useful during a particular transition but remain on the calendar long after the need has passed. None of these activities may appear especially burdensome by themselves, and that is what makes them difficult to evaluate. Collectively, however, they consume significant organizational capacity. A one-hour meeting involving ten people is not one hour of organizational time. It is ten hours before preparation and follow-up are even considered. A report that takes several employees two days to produce every month may represent hundreds of hours over a year. A committee that meets simply because it always has may be consuming attention that could be directed toward something more important.
This is where leaders need to broaden the definition of organizational clutter. It is not only about underperforming programs. It is also about the accumulation of meetings, reports, approval processes, committees, dashboards, and practices that continue without being tested for current value. The challenge is that recurring work becomes almost invisible. People stop seeing it as a choice, and it simply becomes part of the operating environment.
That is why one of the most useful strategic exercises is to imagine that nothing is automatically renewed. If a report had to justify its existence again, would we still produce it? If a meeting were not already on the calendar, would we schedule it today? If a committee did not exist, would we create it now?
When we ask those questions, the burden shifts. Instead of asking why something should stop, we begin asking why it should continue.
Creating Permission to Question What We Do
One of the greatest obstacles to stopping low-value work is culture rather than process. Employees often know which activities create little value. They know which meetings repeat the same conversations, which reports are rarely used, and which processes create unnecessary friction. But knowing is not the same as feeling permission to say so.
Sometimes a process was created by a former president. Sometimes a report is important to one influential person. Sometimes a committee has strong internal ownership. Over time, history becomes justification enough for continuation. I have learned that leaders play an important role in changing that dynamic. If we want people to identify work that is outdated, duplicative, or low-value, we must make it safe to raise the question. Employees should be able to challenge an activity without appearing to challenge the person who created it. The conversation should not be about blame; it should be about value. That brings me to the guiding question for this week: What could we stop doing tomorrow with little or no harm to the mission? I like this question because it immediately changes the tone. It does not ask what we dislike. It asks what we could remove without damaging what matters most. From there, I encourage leadership teams to look carefully at the ordinary work of the organization. Which meetings would no one miss? Which committees have outlived the issue that created them? Where are two departments doing essentially the same work? Stopping does not always mean eliminating something entirely. Sometimes the better answer is to combine, simplify, reduce frequency, automate, or delegate. The point is not to create a list of cuts. The point is to reduce unnecessary friction and recover capacity.
This is also where leaders need to remain disciplined. Activity is not the same as impact. A full calendar can create the appearance of productivity while actually limiting the organization’s ability to do its most important work well.
Stopping Creates Strategic Space
Stopping is not the destination; it is a way to create room for something more important. If an organization eliminates several meetings but simply fills those hours with different meetings, nothing has been gained. If a report is discontinued but staff are immediately assigned another low-value task, the organization has not created capacity. It has only rearranged activity. The real value of stopping comes when leaders deliberately reclaim time and attention and redirect them toward higher-value work. That may mean giving employees more time to work directly with students or clients. It may mean allowing an executive team to focus on one strategic priority rather than five competing initiatives. It may mean using financial savings to strengthen an emerging program that clearly advances the organizational mission. It may simply mean creating enough margin in the organization for people to think, improve, and lead more effectively.
I return often to the idea that clarity precedes progress. Organizations sometimes assume they need more resources when the first question should be whether they are using existing capacity intentionally. That is why stopping can be such an important leadership discipline. It creates space for better choices. The strongest organizations are not necessarily those doing the most. They are often the ones that are clearest about what matters and disciplined enough to protect the capacity required to do it well.
This week, I encourage boards, CEOs, and executive teams to ask one practical question: What could we stop doing tomorrow with little or no harm to the mission? The answer may not be dramatic. It may be a meeting, a report, a committee, a process, or a practice that has simply outlived its value. But small decisions to stop can accumulate just as easily as small decisions to add. The difference is that subtraction creates room.
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I work with governing boards, CEOs, and executive teams to strengthen organizational focus and align resources with mission and impact. Through board retreats, CEO mentoring, strategic conversations, and a focused two-hour Zoom Futuring session, I help leaders step beyond traditional planning to define their preferred future and examine what should continue, what should change, and what may have completed its useful life. Clarity about what belongs in the future, and what does not, is one of the most important forms of stewardship a leadership team can provide.
Rick Aman, PhD, Aman & Associates - rick@rickaman.com | rickaman.com