For years, performance management leaned heavily on financial results and annual reviews to tell organizations how they were doing. That picture is changing fast, and few people are watching the shift as closely as Dr. Sarah Binsaied.
An Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration in Saudi Arabia, Sarah holds a PhD in Nonprofit Marketing from Brunel University of London. Her work sits at the intersection of strategy, marketing, and organizational performance, and she brings an academic’s eye to questions that most executives only have time to answer on instinct: What should organizations actually be measuring? Which tools still hold up under pressure? And what happens when AI starts making judgments that used to belong to people?
In this interview with Performance Magazine, Sarah shares her perspective on where performance management is heading in 2026, why financial KPIs alone no longer tell the full story, and what leaders and researchers should be paying closer attention to as the field evolves.
Trends
What key trends in organizational performance management have you observed emerging so far in 2026?
In 2026, many organizations are moving away from fixed annual strategic plans toward more flexible and adaptive performance management approaches. This includes rolling forecasts, real-time tracking of KPIs, and goals that can be updated as needed. This shift helps organizations respond faster to market changes, new technologies, and evolving stakeholder expectations.
Which of the existing trends, topics, or aspects within performance management have lost their relevance and/or importance, from your point of view?
Relying only on financial KPIs is no longer enough in modern performance management. Today, organizations need to look at both financial and non-financial measures, such as employee engagement, customer experience, innovation, and sustainability. Financial results usually reflect what has already happened and may not reveal early risks or future opportunities. By using broader performance indicators, organizations can better understand long-term value and build a more sustainable competitive advantage.
What does the corporate performance management system of the future look like?
The future performance management system will rely more heavily on AI and predictive analytics. It will use real-time data and machine learning to identify possible performance gaps before they happen, and it will combine financial and non-financial indicators in a single dashboard. This will help organizations make faster decisions, adjust their strategy continuously, and move away from traditional annual reviews that risk becoming outdated quickly.
What will be the major challenges in managing performance in the future, and how should organizations prepare for them?
The main challenge will be employee resistance to change, especially when AI is used in performance evaluation. Some employees may feel worried or uncertain about these tools. Organizations can prepare by offering continuous digital training, clearly explaining how AI will be used, and building trust. Employees should understand that AI is meant to support their work and decisions, not replace or threaten them.
How is technology impacting the way organizations conduct strategic planning and manage performance? Any specific technology tools you would like to mention?
Technology is changing the way organizations approach strategic planning. Instead of relying only on fixed annual reviews, organizations can now use real-time data and predictive analytics to make faster, more evidence-based decisions. Tools such as Power BI help teams display KPIs clearly, connect data across departments, and spot performance trends early. This supports more flexible strategic planning and allows organizations to adjust decisions as new information emerges.
How is sustainability impacting the way organizations conduct strategic planning and manage performance? Any specific sustainability aspects you would like to mention?
In Saudi Arabia, sustainability is becoming an important part of strategic planning, especially because of Vision 2030. Organizations are now expected to measure ESG indicators, covering environmental, social, and governance aspects, alongside financial KPIs. This means tracking environmental impact, social contribution, and governance practices. As a result, sustainability is no longer just about meeting requirements; it is becoming a key factor supporting long-term performance and strategic success.
Practice
What should be improved in the use of strategy and performance management tools to make an organization even more resilient to future crises?
Strategy and performance tools should build in risk scenario planning as part of the core strategic framework, not as a separate activity. This means using scenario analysis, stress-testing, and contingency KPIs when building plans. Doing so helps organizations spot possible risks and disruptions earlier, adjusting their strategies before a crisis hits rather than reacting once the problem has already become serious.
While navigating through these challenging times, what would you consider a best practice in performance management?
A good best practice is involving employees in setting goals and KPIs, rather than assigning targets from the top alone. When employees help create the targets, they feel greater ownership and motivation, and the goals become more realistic, especially in uncertain situations. This approach also helps leaders draw on frontline insights, improving both employee engagement and the quality of performance measures.
How does benchmarking support the improvement of performance management and target-setting systems?
Benchmarking helps organizations understand where they stand compared with others in the same industry. Instead of setting targets based only on internal assumptions, they can draw on real examples from high-performing organizations. By comparing results, processes, and practices, organizations can identify performance gaps and areas for improvement. This also helps them set more realistic, informed targets while learning from strategies that have already proven successful.
Research
Which organizations would you recommend observing due to their approach to managing performance and its subsequent results? Why?
I recommend looking at Saudi Aramco, because it combines strong performance management with long-term strategic planning and operational excellence. The company uses structured KPIs across different business units, supported by clear governance and a culture of continuous improvement. This makes Aramco a useful example for understanding how large, complex organizations manage performance effectively and align daily operations with strategic goals.
What aspects of performance management should be explored more through research, given their importance in practice?
More research is needed to understand how employee wellbeing affects long-term organizational performance. Many studies focus on short-term productivity, but it is still unclear how wellbeing programs create lasting results over time. Organizations need stronger evidence on whether these initiatives lead to real performance improvement or only temporary benefits, especially since the impact may differ across industries, workplaces, and organizational cultures.
What are the key competencies of a successful business leader (C-level executive)?
Successful C-level executives need strong emotional intelligence and the ability to lead change in a clear, supportive way. They should understand employees’ feelings during transitions, communicate the vision simply, and build trust across the organization. Emotional intelligence helps leaders manage resistance, motivate people, and create commitment, making change more sustainable rather than dependent solely on top-down decisions or pressure.
What are the key competencies of a strategy and performance manager to succeed nowadays?
Nowadays, a strategy and performance manager needs strong communication skills and the ability to influence people at different levels of the organization. This role is not only about analyzing data but also about explaining it clearly and usefully. When managers can turn complex strategic information into simple messages for executives, middle managers, and frontline employees, they help create alignment, support, and better strategy execution.
In their 1985 paper “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters describe strategic planning as a continuum. There is deliberate strategic planning on one end and emergent strategic planning on the opposite.
Deliberate strategic planning represents a structured, systematic approach to strategy development that emphasizes a planned, intentional, and coherent process whereby organizations set clear objectives and design strategies to achieve them. This approach presupposes a stable environment where goals and actions align closely.
On the other hand, an emergent strategy is more adaptive, arising from patterns of action rather than premeditated plans. While emergent strategies thrive on flexibility and responsiveness, deliberate strategies emphasize clarity, predictability, and alignment with long-term objectives.
Despite the growing popularity of emergent strategic planning, the deliberate approach remains vital for corporations aiming for sustainable success. One of its core strengths lies in the distinct roles it ascribes to top management and middle managers. In the deliberate process, top management acts as architects of the strategy, setting overarching goals and ensuring alignment with the organization’s vision, while middle managers focus on operationalizing these strategies and managing their implementation.
As outlined by J. Scott Armstrong in his paper on the importance of value planning in making strategic decisions, deliberate strategic planning unfolds in four distinct phases, with each phase contributing to securing stakeholder commitment. Before diving into these phases, it is important to recognize that historical data serves as one of the cornerstones of the process. Organizations rely on their data repository to provide past performance metrics and external trends.
Top management can utilize historical data to identify patterns, trends, and benchmarks, which they can then use to design actionable plans. Meanwhile, middle managers can use this data to refine tactical operations, ensuring that daily activities align with strategic objectives. Having a robust data architecture not only allows a company to more accurately analyze what has happened but also to forecast future trends, mitigate risks, and design strategies grounded in evidence rather than conjecture. With this foundation, organizations can proceed through the deliberate strategic planning phases with clear direction.
Defining Long-Term Objectives: The first phase involves defining the company’s long-term goals or ultimate objectives. These goals must align with the aspirations and priorities of various stakeholders, such as employees, investors, and customers. Tools like stakeholder analysis can identify key interests and concerns, while SWOT analysis evaluates the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Furthermore, in later stages of this planning process, the use of SMART criteria—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—ensures the clear statement and actionability of goals. By integrating these tools, companies create a foundation for a cohesive strategic vision that resonates across all stakeholder groups.
Generating Strategies: The second phase centers on generating strategies and alternative approaches to achieving these long-term goals. Companies must consider comprehensive strategies that incorporate slack resources—such as additional time, finances, or facilities—to account for uncertainty and enhance the plan’s flexibility. Generating alternative strategies is a crucial practice that bolsters adaptability. Techniques such as brainstorming sessions, unstructured group meetings, and scenario planning encourage creativity and provide contingency options. This phase ensures that the organization has a repertoire of well-thought-out strategies ready to deploy, even in dynamic or unpredictable environments.
Evaluating Strategies: After developing strategies and alternatives, the third phase evaluates their feasibility in relation to the first phase’s objectives. This evaluation process ensures that the proposed strategies are realistic, effective, and aligned with the company’s mission. Methods such as checklists, the Delphi technique, and the Devil’s Advocate approach provide structured ways to scrutinize strategies. For instance, a checklist can ensure that all critical factors, such as resource availability and market conditions, are considered. The Delphi technique harnesses internal expert consensus, whereas the Devil’s Advocate method identifies potential flaws or risks. This rigorous evaluation phase narrows down the list of strategies to those most likely to succeed.
Strategy Monitoring and Implementation: The final phase involves systematically monitoring the results of implemented strategies. Companies should establish a feedback system with clearly defined intervals—such as quarterly or semi-annual reviews—to assess performance and make necessary adjustments. This system must account for changes in external factors, such as economic, technological, geopolitical, and social shifts, as well as internal factors like evolving strengths, weaknesses, and competitive actions. Key performance indicators (KPIs) serve as a critical tool for monitoring progress, enabling organizations to measure outcomes against predefined benchmarks. Integrating KPIs into the company’s performance management system and linking them to the organizational incentive system ensures accountability and motivates stakeholders to align their efforts with strategic goals.
Securing Stakeholder Commitment
A deliberate plan significantly enhances a company’s ability to secure stakeholder commitments throughout the process. A well-structured plan not only communicates the company’s long-term objectives but also fosters a sense of ownership among stakeholders. For instance, engaging stakeholders in the development of alternative strategies allows them to voice their concerns and align their interests with the organization’s goals.
Similarly, an accurate feedback and monitoring system ensures transparency, showing stakeholders how their contributions influence outcomes and incentivizing them to remain invested in the strategy’s success. This is especially crucial in large corporations where the different parts of the organization must work in alignment with the organization’s objective.
Strategic Foundation
Deliberate strategic planning remains an indispensable tool for organizations, offering clarity, structure, and alignment in an increasingly complex business environment. While emergent strategies provide flexibility and responsiveness, deliberate strategies establish a solid foundation that guides decision-making and ensures consistency.
Technology such as big data further enhances this process by equipping organizations with more comprehensive and timely datasets to generate actionable insights, maintain advantages, and refine strategies with greater precision. Furthermore, many companies could benefit from leveraging both approaches, enabling top management to define clear objectives while empowering all levels of management to adapt and innovate. This integrated approach ensures that organizations remain resilient, adaptable, and primed for success in the face of evolving challenges.
In an age characterized by rapid technological advancements and market shifts, the importance of strategy—whether corporate or business—cannot be overstated. A well-defined strategy is a roadmap that guides organizations through complex market dynamics and helps them identify opportunities while mitigating risks. Effective planning and execution of this roadmap hinges on a thorough examination of its core concepts. This approach starts with a clear understanding of the relevant terms as well as how concepts differ, complement, connect, and contribute to the entire process.
Business Strategy and Corporate Strategy
Both business strategy and corporate strategy are essential for a company’s success. However, they differ significantly in scope, focus, and decision-making levels.
Business Strategy
Business strategy encompasses the methods an organization employs to achieve its goals within a specific business unit. It serves as a framework for generating value through the production and delivery of goods or services while focusing on effective competition within a particular market. This strategy includes allocating resources to execute the chosen approach as well as making decisions regarding the capabilities and activities crucial for market success. By concentrating on specific units, business strategies enable organizations to respond smoothly to market changes and customer demands.
Corporate Strategy
Conversely, corporate strategy outlines the overall plan for a corporation with multiple business units, focusing on achieving objectives at the highest strategic level. This broader approach manages the business portfolio to create value and ensure alignment with the corporation’s vision. It involves making critical decisions about where to compete across various industries and markets, including which businesses to enter or exit and considerations regarding diversification and strategic alliances. This high-level perspective is essential for guiding the organization toward sustainable growth and profitability.
Despite their differences, both business and corporate strategies are vital for a corporation’s overall success. Combined, they serve as a comprehensive framework for navigating the complexities of the modern business landscape.
Vision and mission statements serve distinct but complementary purposes, together forming a comprehensive framework for an organization’s direction.
Vision Statement
A vision statement articulates an organization’s long-term aspirations and desired future state. It inspires stakeholders by outlining what the organization aims to achieve in the future. Typically broad and aspirational, vision statements paint a clear picture of ultimate goals. For instance, Rockwater Energy Solutions’—a subsidiary of Brown & Root/Halliburton—vision statement is “As our customers’ preferred provider, we shall be the industry leader in providing the highest standards of safety and quality to our clients.”
Mission Statement
In contrast, a mission statement defines the organization’s current purpose and the specific actions it takes to achieve its objectives. It outlines what the organization does, who it serves, and how it operates daily. Mission statements are more concrete and focused, often detailing core values and guiding principles. For example, LinkedIn’s mission is “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”
Together, the vision statement establishes long-term goals while the mission statement describes current objectives necessary to achieve those goals. This dual framework guides organizational activities and aligns stakeholders toward a common purpose.
Strategic Planning and Operational Planning
Synchronizing strategic planning and operational planning promote consistency in decision-making, but they serve different purposes and focus on varied timeframes.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning involves outlining the future direction of an entity, which can be an organization, department, or individual. This process includes identifying goals and determining the methods to achieve them.
Typically spanning three to five years, strategic planning is a long-term process that evolves, allowing for annual adjustments. This plan is developed by top management, including the leaders, board members and other executives, while considering the external business environment, such as competition and market trends.
For a strong strategy, strategic planning should adopt a systematic approach. This includes clarifying the organization’s current state, analyzing the external environment, defining its mission and values, developing strategic themes, setting objectives with key performance indicators (KPIs), identifying initiatives, and regularly reviewing the strategic plan to ensure alignment and adaptability.
Operational Planning
Operational planning supports the strategic plan by aligning day-to-day activities with tactical execution. It plays a crucial role in achieving organizational goals through detailed short-term plans specific to departments. An effective operational plan includes several essential characteristics to ensure successful execution. It starts with an introduction and situation report, followed by an overview of tasks, objectives, and overarching goals.
The plan outlines the methods to be used, necessary resources (personnel, equipment, and supplies), and timelines with benchmarks and milestones. It defines the administrative structure, operating budget, and funding acquisition strategy. Roles and responsibilities are clearly specified, including required competencies for personnel. Monitoring mechanisms are established with relevant indicators. Finally, the plan includes provisions for reporting, all contributing to a comprehensive framework that aligns daily operations with strategic objectives.
SWOT Analysis and PESTLE Analysis
SWOT and PESTLE analyses are strategic tools designed to evaluate the internal and external forces affecting organizations. By using SWOT analysis to examine an organization’s internal capabilities and PESTLE analysis to assess its external environment, organizations can develop strategies to proactively address challenges and effectively plan for future initiatives.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis identifies an organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats. This assessment informs strategic decisions by emphasizing strengths, addressing weaknesses, and capitalizing on opportunities while mitigating potential threats.
PESTLE Analysis
PESTLE analysis evaluates external factors influencing an organization, including political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental aspects. This framework helps assess a company’s objectives by identifying and analyzing crucial drivers of change in the external environment.
Both SWOT and PESTLE analyses serve as effective starting points for strategy formulation, offering valuable insights for business development and marketing efforts. Conducting these analyses enhances an organization’s understanding of its competitors and provides the insights necessary to gain a competitive advantage. Approaching them requires realism and attention to detail.
OKRs and the BSC
After defining their strategies through strategic and operational planning, organizations must measure progress effectively. Both objectives and key results (OKRs) and the balanced scorecard (BSC) follow a similar process of setting objectives, tracking progress, analyzing results, and making data-driven decisions.
OKRs and the BSC emphasize the importance of establishing clear objectives, promoting transparent communication about goal achievement, serving as strategic tools, and ensuring measurability across all organizational levels. This approach enables the effective communication of priorities throughout the organization.
Objectives and Key Results
OKRs are a goal-setting framework that organizations use to define and track their objectives and associated outcomes. The objectives component outlines what an organization aims to achieve, while the key results specify measurable outcomes indicating progress toward those objectives.
While both OKRs and the BSC are strategic management tools, they differ in several key aspects. OKRs prioritize ambitious, aspirational goals and encourage a bottom-up, decentralized approach to goal-setting and achievement. They often have a shorter-term focus, with quarterly reviews and adjustments. Additionally, OKRs emphasize intrinsic motivation and empower teams to take ownership of their work.
Furthermore, OKRs are best suited for organizations that thrive on innovation, agility, and employee empowerment. They are ideal for fast-paced, dynamic environments where adaptability is key. By focusing on ambitious goals and empowering teams, OKRs can drive significant growth and transformation.
Balanced Scorecard
In contrast, the BSC is a framework aimed at managing strategy in a balanced way across four key perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth. It offers clarity regarding strategy and ensures that activities are aligned with strategic objectives.
The BSC typically focuses on more traditional, top-down, and centralized approaches to strategic planning and execution. They often involve longer-term objectives and KPIs, and they prioritize a balanced perspective that considers various aspects of value creation. While OKRs are more flexible and adaptable, the BSC provides a more structured and standardized framework for strategic management.
The BSC is well-suited for organizations that prioritize stability, control, and long-term planning. It is particularly effective in regulated industries or large, complex organizations that require a structured approach to performance management.
Knowing the differences between them will enable organizations to choose the right tool for the job and collaborate smoothly, eliminating uncertainty and driving efficiency. With this collective understanding, organizations can steer their roadmaps with goal-driven direction and purposeful synchronization.
Most companies believe strategy begins to go wrong with a bad decision, a bad market, a bad investment, a bad acquisition, bad execution, bad leadership, or a slow response time.
Many others, however, find that the problems begin far earlier: long before strategy collapses publicly or leaders acknowledge that something is wrong, there is often an altogether less obvious stage. That stage is when people already know something is wrong:
Someone has seen the risks and contradictions.
A second someone has already calculated that the timelines are unrealistic, the priorities are conflicting, the resources are just not there, or the initiative is off course.
A third someone did not say it out loud or, at least, not loud enough to matter.
Enter strategic silence: the reality that the most strategically important issues within organizations are almost always the least likely to be spoken about. Ironically, it is often silence itself that is the signal.
Why Strategic Silence Matters More Than Most Companies Realize
Organizations spend an inordinate amount of time on formal strategy discussions, planning sessions, leadership off-sites, dashboards, quarterly reviews, transformation programs, and town halls.
In appearance, there is constant communication. Much of that communication is, however, operational rather than strategic: teams talk about timescales, milestones, reporting structure, deliverables, and metrics.
What it does not cover is the silent, uncomfortable conversations happening beneath the surface:
Is this initiative still aligned with reality?
Are we too fragmented or pursuing too many priorities?
Is the leadership ignoring glaring warning signs?
Does anyone here actually think this timeline is deliverable?
Are departments truly aligned or just outwardly acquiescent?
Has the organization become too politically cautious to question the core assumptions?
These conversations often remain unspoken, yet not quite as often as you’d think as a consequence of disengagement, but because organizations quietly signal to employees that some discussions are permissible and others are not, so silence becomes ingrained as part of how the organization functions. It is systemic.
Strategic Silence is Almost Always Rational, Not Accidental
One of the most common mistakes people make in organizations is assuming that silence stems from incompetence, apathy, or cowardice. In reality, silence is often a highly rational behaviour.
Employees carefully watch how the organization reacts when someone expresses dissent, criticism, uncertainty, or bad news. They see who gets rewarded, who gets punished, and who is labeled “difficult” or “not culturally-fit” for having questioned leadership’s assumptions.
A poorly handled exchange with a manager at a meeting, a project leader communicating their insights & then being told their continued involvement would not be required after raising a risk, or a team member labeled “negative” or “notaligned” after questioning a strategy, could have years of impact. On the face of it, these are not individually significant. Taken together, they establish a form of “organizational memory“.
People learn what happens when you speak your mind. Silence becomes a strategy when speaking your mind carries career risks, so many companies erroneously feel they have strategic alignment when all they have is suppression.
Silence is not agreement. It is far more likely that employees have already done the arithmetic and found it safer not to speak up.
The Illusion of Strategic Alignment
Strategic silence creates an illusion of organizational alignment. Meetings appear to go well, and ideas get brainstormed. Initiatives seem to be supported, and resistance appears minimal. Leadership interprets this lack of conflict as alignment.
The reality, however, is far from unified.
People engage in performative alignment: they openly support initiatives they secretly doubt because they either believe their input will make no difference, they feel that leadership has already made too big a political commitment to be swayed, or they just do not want to be perceived as a “negative” in an environment where optimism, speed, incisiveness, and decisiveness are rewarded.
Ironically, the more rhetoric about unity and “getting behind the vision” that organizations push, the less likely legitimate concerns are to surface, and no one wants to be the person perceived as hindering progress. The consequence of this is that leadership becomes increasingly insulated from the truth. Information flowing upward becomes toned down, edited, mischaracterized, or even omitted, while risks are reframed as “manageable“, and setbacks are reframed as “minor bumps“.
Unrealistic plans survive far longer than they should because no one wants to be responsible for confronting the leadership about their viability, creating a dangerous organizational paradox: the most strategically sensitive point of discussion is precisely when honest feedback is least likely.
Organizations Quietly Teach People Not to Speak
Organizations never formally tell people to be silent, but teach this indirectly. It is signaled by the way executives react to dissent.
The postponement of difficult conversations, due to the need for teams to present only positive news, makes meetings purely performative. Words and phrases matter: “Let’s stay aligned,” “We need everyone on the same page,” “Now is not the time to share concerns,” and “Bring solutions, not problems,” though all valid, can quietly inhibit necessary strategic friction.
Problems don’t go away, but people then stop volunteering relevant information because they have been unconsciously conditioned to prioritize their political safety over strategic honesty. This is particularly dangerous in hierarchical organizations, where information, as it travels upward, weakens.
By the time risks reach the CEO, they have often been diluted to the point of non-existence, not due to employee incompetence but to the selective filtering of information at each layer of the organization in an attempt to avoid conflict or judgment. When this becomes the norm, strategic silence stops being an occasional issue; it becomes an entrenched part of the operational system.
The Strategic Cost Of Silence: Much Larger Than Most Leaders Assume
Strategic silence doesn’t just result in communication problems; it results in organizational blind spots. When people stop raising concerns early, the organization fails to identify strategic problems at a stage where they are still manageable:
Risks go unnoticed.
Logical connections between and across various elements are not built.
Assumptions go unchallenged.
Weaknesses quietly build up behind the scenes until they are unignorable.
A backlog of issues becomes a mountain of problems.
There are many examples in history of organizations that failed because they had no way to hear from their employees, even though several people identified problems in a timely manner. In many post-mortems of failed product launches, transformations, compliance breakdowns, or operational crises, we see the same pattern: someone already knew.
Employees at the front lines detected customer frustration months before management took notice.
Middle managers noted the development of unrealistic timelines.
Teams understood that conflicting priorities were emerging, even if execution hadn’t yet faltered.
Yet the information was not communicated clearly enough or safely enough upward for the organization to pivot in time, which is precisely what makes strategic silence so damaging. It delays adaptation, and in today’s organizations, delayed adaptation is frequently more harmful than making the wrong initial decision.
A flawed strategy can be rectified, provided organizations remain capable of candid internal feedback. However, once silence takes hold, it becomes part of the culture. Organizations lose the capacity to self-correct; they become strategically deaf.
Why Organizations Go Quieter Under Pressure
Paradoxically, one of the more counterintuitive dynamics in organizations is that they often go less honest when honesty is most needed. Under pressure, organizations constrict dialogue rather than broaden it.
When facing financial uncertainty, competitive threats, restructuring, rapid growth, or intense public scrutiny, leaders experience psychological pressure.
As a result, organizations naturally shift toward control. Circles of decision-making become tighter, which in turn prompts discussions to become more measured, and this now trickles upwards, forcing leadership to focus on speed and alignment over inquiry. Surprisingly, this is often coupled with a zeroing in on certainty, yet certainty often works against speed. Therefore, the organization now starts pulling in two very different directions without consciously realizing it.
Language evolves, too. Questions such as “What are we missing?“, “What assumptions should we challenge?” or “What are people not saying?” slowly give way to “We need action.” “We need focus.” or “We cannot afford confusion.”
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle. Pressure breeds silence → silence masks problems → hidden problems generate more pressure → since silence initially simulates stability, organizations may not perceive the risk until it is too late.
This is how many highly aligned organizations suddenly collapse. Within the organization, disagreement has already collapsed. The organization is no longer learning, although it may continue to appear functional.
The Problem Isn’t Usually That People Won’t Speak
Most discussions about organizational silence frame the issue around making people “speak up.” Yet this perspective can completely misunderstand the nature of the problem.
Most employees are already constantly talking through side conversations, private networks, instant messages, hallway discussions, and individual meetings. The actual problem is the lack of systems capable of hearing uncomfortable messages without distortion or reaction. It isn’t just a matter of voice, but of reception.
Many leaders believe they encourage openness by asking for feedback, but employees learn by behaviour. They observe how leaders respond under pressure, what happens to critics, and whether difficult discussions lead to productive changes or political punishment. If leaders consistently react with defensiveness, dismissal, retaliation, or inaction, employees learn to protect themselves by staying silent. Over time, silence shifts from a response to fear to one based on efficiency: why bother raising concerns if it yields no results?
This is where organizations often misunderstand psychological safety. It isn’t something achieved through a series of workshops, a slogan, a quick session with a personal coach, or an internal communication campaign. Psychological safety is built over time through repeated evidence that challenging truths are handled constructively rather than punished politically. Consistency is everything because an organization’s culture is transmitted through memory.
Employees do not remember a PowerPoint on openness, but they do remember the meeting in which someone disagreed with management and what happened as a result.
What Well Strategically Healthy Organizations Do Differently
Strategically fit organizations aren’t usually those led by the wisest sage of them all, the most polished & charismatic leaders, or supported by the best-written strategic plans devised in the history of strategic planning.
They are typically organizations that can have honest, candid internal conversations even in uncomfortable moments, without manufactured, constant conflict or endless discussion. These organizations provide a process by which uncomfortable truths are pushed upwards before they become disasters. Such well-built organizations deliberately provide room for strategic friction.
Questions such as the following become all-important and a priority:
What are we avoiding talking about?
Where do we pretend agreement exists?
What bad news do we aren’t getting in a timely fashion?
What assumptions have become politically difficult to question?
What would employees say if there were no reputational consequences to telling us what they think?
Organizations rarely make the mistake of lacking sufficient intelligence; they typically err by letting inconvenient truths stay trapped beneath the surface too long.
Healthy organizations that culturally promote open debate and discussion recognize that silence itself is a form of information: a quieted room sends a message.
Strategic leaders learn to take note of what is consistently left unsaid, because patterns of avoidance often reveal the organization’s true condition more faithfully than any corporate strategic statement ever will.
Final Thoughts
Organizations tend to want to portray strategy as being about decision-making.
In reality, strategy is just as much about avoidance: what a leader isn’t willing to address, the risks that it is politically infeasible to deal with, the trade-offs that it’s unpopular to admit we are making, the assumptions that it is politically unworkable to challenge, the reality that employees subtly adapt to rather than deal with.
In that sense, silence isn’t distinct from strategy; it is strategy itself, and very often the best way to understand the organization’s strategies is to analyze what conversations are consistently excluded from them. This is often the clearest indicator of where organizations are heading.
To the unknowing onlooker from the outside, modern organizations feel like they are running out of ideas. Products look alike, services deliver the same conveniences, features are often identical across tens of companies, and branding has become as diverse as the ocean, but as deep as a puddle.
The reality is that all of this is the result of too many ideas; so many that companies are often drowning in them.
Every quarter, there is another expansion opportunity, another platform integration, another market segment, another internal initiative, another feature request, another “strategic priority“. In theory, this should make organizations stronger. In practice, it is more likely to weaken organizations, dilute focus, foster strategic fatigue, increase operational complexity, and cause them to slowly lose clarity about what truly matters.
Most strategy conversations still center on addition:
What should we build?
What should we launch?
What market should we enter?
What initiative should we fund?
Few are the organizations that ask the more important questions: what should we deliberately stop doing?
This omission is becoming one of the defining strategic vulnerabilities of modern businesses.
The competitive challenge in the 21st century is no longer opportunity, since opportunity is everywhere. The challenge is filtration.
Organizations operate in environments of permanent optionality, where the number of potential initiatives significantly exceeds their true cognitive, operational, organizational, and managerial capacity. This alters the meaning of strategy and what it entails for the future.
In mature organizations, the competitive advantage will likely come not from doing more, but from doing less. Organizations that win are those that are the most rigorous about what they refuse to do.
The Expansion Trap
Growth cultures inherently reward expansion. Starting new things is visible: new projects signal ambition; new products signify innovation; new initiatives create momentum and political capital internally; and saying “yes” feels optimistic, energetic, passionate, vibrant, and futuristic.
Stopping things is felt as failure. It sends a shattering shudder down the shoulders of the entire C-suite and managerial corps, since organizations develop a structural bias towards accumulation.
Projects continue after their relevance to strategy has passed. Features remain because they are deemed too risky to eliminate. Teams inherit duties that are never reassessed. Legacy processes survive simply because they exist. Entire portfolios continue to expand without a mechanism to shrink them. Organizations become an accumulation of past decisions, a sort of operational museum.
This slow buildup rarely manifests immediately; instead, friction begins to emerge in various hidden forms, over time.
Decision-making becomes slow as too many priorities compete for attention.
Roadmaps become filled with exceptions and complexities.
Meetings multiply while strategic understanding dwindles.
Teams are spending increasing effort managing complexity rather than generating value.
Managers begin mistaking activity for progress.
The modern growth paradox is that business success brings more vulnerability to strategic diffusion. Complexity is compounding silently, while initial additions are small and manageable. After a while, interdependencies build up, communication costs begin to rise, coordination complexity increases, and priorities blur terribly.
Eventually, organizations reach a point where internal complexity management begins to cannibalize their ability to innovate. Organizations become busy everywhere and decisive nowhere.
The Hidden Cost of “More“
Most companies dramatically underestimate the true cost of an expansionary strategy by focusing only on direct costs, rather than cognitive and operational costs.
Rarely is the “cost” of a project defined by the amount of leadership attention it consumes. Seldom is a new initiative defined by the coordination burden it creates across organizational boundaries. Hardly ever is a market segment defined by how it distorts a company’s operational focus. Yet as economically efficient as modern businesses claim to be, they seem to forget entirely that organizational attention is a finite resource.
Each initiative competes for management time, decision-making resources, meeting time, engineering capacity, operational coordination, the organization’s emotional bandwidth, and strategic coherence.
Overload becomes a severe laceration, mentally, which then leads to the real danger: fragmentation.
When organizations attempt to do too many things at once, their strategic coherence begins to break down. At the grassroots and mid-level, teams no longer grasp the meaning of success and “work well done,” and employees lose sight of why they are working on a given task. In the meantime, leaders become unable to identify essential work from organizational momentum.
The result is an organizational phenomenon that many teams experience but rarely call “attention bankruptcy,” which occurs simply because there is not enough organizational focus to gain momentum.
Ironically, many organizations see this fragmentation as a signal that they need to do more. Performance flags so leadership launches another new program, another new reporting structure, another new task force, another new strategic theme.
Complexity becomes the solution for complexity.
The Real Strategy Thus Becomes Not Addition, but Exclusion
This is the most frequent misunderstanding about strategy within organizations.
Strategy is not a statement of intentions.
Strategy is not an aggregation of actions.
Strategy is not organizational maximalism.
Real strategy is subtraction.
Michael Porter famously asserted that the essence of strategy is what you choose NOT to do. It is a concept that is now even more critical given the environment of abundant optionality.
A choice of strategy is simultaneously the exclusion of alternatives.
The choice of one market necessitates the forgoing of another.
The decision of one customer segment means ignoring certain customers.
The commitment to one capability means saying no to another.
A choice for focus is a declaration against broadness.
Without these trade-offs, we revert to a strategy of competition convergence, in which organizations grow to look like everybody else by simultaneously pursuing every attractive option.
This is the most important reason why organizations seem very active but strategically anonymous. They are confusing motion with posture. However, an organization’s strategy that does not involve subtraction is merely expansion without focus.
The most successful organizations realize counter-intuitively that constraints can be a driver of focus:
The more an organization narrows its focus, the better its execution becomes.
The more an organization stops initiatives, the faster it delivers.
The more an organization simplifies its portfolio, the more it differentiates itself.
The more it protects its attention, the better the decisions it makes.
Being focused does not mean you lack ambition. It means you understand that catch-all is not the profile for your specific business.
The Psychology of Why Organizations Cannot Stop
If subtraction has the strategic benefits it does, why is it so difficult to implement? Well, every member of the organization feels psychological discomfort at stopping:
Leaders may appear uncertain or undecided.
Team members may have an emotional attachment to the initiatives they developed.
Executives have a psychological aversion to accounting for past sunk costs.
Organizations are accustomed to framing termination as failure rather than adaptation.
Several behavioural psychology theories explain the aversion:
A) Loss aversion describes an individual or organization’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses over realizing equivalent gains.
Therefore, organizations continue to pursue initiatives that have long been underperforming simply because abandonment feels like a worse outcome than continued risk-taking. Weak initiatives do not disappear because they feel more painful to kill than to continue funding them.
B) The sunk cost fallacy makes it difficult to assess initiatives in the future, given how much we have already invested in their past.
Organizations continue supporting a project not because its future returns are expected to exceed its costs, but because abandoning it would require accounting for past failures.
C) The endowment effect describes the bias of organizations overvaluing objects simply because they own them.
Projects will always have some level of emotional attachment, internalize an initiative’s product/service’s market success, deem a mediocre project to be “crucial,” label its legacy system a “mission-critical system” even if its purpose is tangential, or treat a temporary experiment as a permanent organizational burden.
Organizations will accumulate layers of strategic residue for which nobody will be accountable for removing. A dangerous asymmetry then forms: starting things is easy when you’re optimistic; finishing them is hard when you’re disciplined. Unfortunately, organizational behaviours amplify the easy part while suppressing the harder part.
Optionality Is the New Organizational Threat
For decades, business strategy has revolved around scarcity: a lack of markets, limited information, a dearth of access, and limited distribution.
Today, we are experiencing abundance: too many opportunities, too many technologies, too many directions, too many adjacent markets, too many partnerships, and too many initiatives.
Humorously enough, in the business world, we live in the age of optionality saturation where scarcity has been thoroughly vanquished.
Optionality leads to strategic paralysis. Without filters, organizations chase opportunities reactively rather than strategically. Organizations then start to believe that each opportunity is potentially transformative, a major threat/upside, and deserves immediate investment. An organization, however, tends to forget that it does not have unlimited attention. It gets blinded by the “new shiny,” by the constantly dangling carrot-on-the-stick, and soon it will run into a wall at full throttle.
Too much strategic expansion will inevitably lead to organizational fragmentation. Over time, it will become uncomfortable and slowly start to realize that it is not actually threatened externally, but internally.
Indeed, the single greatest threat to a mature organization may not be what others can do, but what the organization can’t stop doing internally.
The reason strategic subtraction stops being an operational change becomes a competitive advantage: organizations that excel at filtering can outmaneuver and outperform organizations that over-commit to doing too many things in a world saturated with options.
Organizations That Know How to Subtract
It’s one thing to be aware of the risks of optionality. It’s another thing entirely to build an organization that can resist it.
The truth is, most organizations don’t fail because of a lack of intelligence, cunning, shrewdness, or ambition. They fail under the weight of the accumulated complexity they never learned to subtract. Over time, every unchecked initiative, every added process, every “temporary” exception, every politically preserved project adds another layer of operational gravity.
The problem is then revealed to be less about insufficient strategic alignment and more about a lack of organizational subtraction capability. Once complexity infiltrates an organization, it begins to defend itself fervently and feverishly:
Projects gain internal champions
Processes turn into institutional habits
Legacy products acquire emotional protection
Customer accommodations become permanent obligations
Temporary workarounds become operational doctrine
It is for this reason that subtraction cannot be left to occasional leadership willpower or annual reorganization efforts. It must be built into the organization’s infrastructure if it wants to maintain focus, since the best performing organizations do not just innovate – they subtract.
Portfolio Pruning as a Strategic Discipline
The most potent signal of strategic maturity is subtraction. In a growing organization, subtraction is difficult to justify, since expansion feels as though it enables an ever-growing list of possible ventures. However, resources never grow nearly as quickly as complexity does.
A time comes when the organization faces a stark choice: actively subtract or allow complexity to subtract for them. High-performing organizations must proactively review which projects no longer support strategic imperatives, which products create more complexity than value, which customers require deviations from core strategy, which meetings serve to coordinate rather than decide, and which initiatives persist purely through inertia.
It’s important to understand that this is not about cutting costs or reducing the organization’s size. It is about strategic filtration and the ability to clarify its focus. Eliminating even one distraction can create disproportionate capacity.
For instance, getting rid of a poorly performing product may allow engineering to focus on core offerings, simplify messaging, improve the customer experience, and reduce leadership attention. As complexity compounds, so does the benefit of its removal. This is why highly mature organizations often narrow their focus as they scale, and while the conventional wisdom is the opposite, the truest sophistication lies in knowing where to point the organization rather than merely broadening its aperture.
The “Anti-Goal”: Defining what you are Not
Most organizations are designed around what they will pursue (goals). Few organizations define what they will not pursue (anti-goals); yet, in the age of hyper-optionality, anti-goals may be one of the most valuable strategic tools organizations have to avoid being overwhelmed by their potential to do anything and everything.
Goals establish a direction – anti-goals establish a guardrail. They create bounds that an organization will actively refuse to cross, even as it scales. That boundary could be related to customer segments (which they won’t serve), the complexity they won’t allow, the operating model they won’t adopt, the revenue streams they will avoid if they pull focus, the growth pathways they won’t pursue if they threaten core coherence.
Anti-goals are not rigid. They are strategic self-preservation tools & techniques. Organizations that don’t define anti-goals can find themselves gradually absorbing seemingly individually sensible opportunities until the business model is something the organization never intentionally designed. Anti-goals, therefore, create the defensiveness that comes with clear boundaries.
In layman’s terms, anti-goals protect identity.
Protecting Your Focus as a Competitive Resource
One of the most counterintuitive aspects of organizational performance is that attention functions just like capital. It is a finite, allocable resource that, once diluted, rapidly loses its value, and most organizations are utterly reckless in how they manage it.
We allow meetings to expand unchecked, communication channels to multiply ad infinitum, and projects to contend equally for the eyes of executives. Our teams get free rein to context-switch between incompatible goals, our leaders to append new programs to already saturated systems, and eventually, to create a culture where no one can sustain deep strategic focus long enough to achieve breakthrough results.
So, now, what used to be a mundane aspect – organizational attention – has now become a defining competitive advantage of modern business. Companies compete on capital, technology, or people, yes, but nowadays, they also compete on clarity.
The ability for an organization to focus its collective attention span on a few core initiatives has become exceedingly rare, and that rarity creates a stark competitive advantage. That is also why simplification is increasingly becoming a strategic choice: it encapsulates both aesthetics and operational concentration.
By removing non-essential complexity, organizations increase decision velocity, improve the quality of their communication, enhance their execution, and increase their accountability. Beyond that, it restores organizational strategic visibility and allows organizations to distinguish between signal and noise again.
The Leadership Disciplines of “No, Not Now“
Most leaders misconstrue the notion of strategic restraint as negativity. Strategic refusal, however, is among the highest and noblest acts of organizational stewardship.
Every “yes” to one new activity implies saying “no” to something else. Every new program is essentially taking from Peter to pay Paul. Disciplined leaders internalize this exchange, as they are aware that the best strategy is not mindlessly doing the greatest number of things; it is about doing the most appropriate number of things with coherence and cohesiveness.
Strategic refusal doesn’t have to be about absolute rejection, though. Very often, the appropriate response to a promising opportunity is “No, not now.” Discipline around timing and learning to “leave things for later” is crucial since even valuable initiatives can become disruptive when undertaken simultaneously or prematurely.
This then leaves us with a distinction of paramount importance: while some organizations fail because they select poor initiatives, many actually fail because they undertake too many appropriate initiatives simultaneously.
Poor prioritization may look like aggression from within, with organizations convincing themselves that parallel growth demonstrates agility and initiative. However, it actually results in weak execution across the board. Strategic timing promotes sequentiality, sequence protects focus, and focus ensures quality execution. Organizational ambition degenerates into fragmentation without sequencing.
Why Subtraction is Terrifying, But Produces Speed
Subtraction, in contrast, carries a natural psychological burden. Adding new activities creates psychological safety, and adding projects breeds a sense of momentum, security, and a feeling of adaptability and dynamic evolution.
Subtraction strips away these comforts unceremoniously. It demands that leaders make a commitment, removing fallback justifications and exposing strategic bets more clearly. It calls upon us to endure a degree of immediate discomfort for a larger strategic gain, but that discomfort is precisely why subtraction will prove to be an advantage.
Organizations are often unable to endure the psychological discomfort of exclusion. They hedge their bets and make too many too soon, diluting rather than differentiating. Companies that excel at subtraction are the opposite. They relentlessly simplify, ruthlessly eliminate, deliberately protect attention, and intentionally make the painful choice of reducing initiatives. They realize that real speed doesn’t come from acceleration but from eliminating friction. That is the underlying brilliance of organizational subtraction: as soon as distractions are removed, momentum becomes exponential.
Final Thoughts
Business culture continues to venerate the act of adding: new initiatives are rewarded, growth reports make the headlines, complexity is equated with sophistication, and a portly portfolio is seen as a hallmark of success.
However, beneath the surface, more and more organizations are coming to understand that they are drowning from abundance: too many priorities, too many systems, too many initiatives, too many competing desires demanding the time and energy of their people.
Strategic subtraction will likely become one of the next great leadership disciplines because organizations that can refuse to do the many seemingly “right” things and instead embrace doing the one thing will achieve a level of clarity, focus, alignment, and speed that will eclipse those that cling to expansion at the expense of execution.
The future belongs to organizations that have mastery over their attention and will have the courage and discipline to protect that most sacred resource above all else.
