I have been listening to Faris Aranki on Rory Sutherland's podcast. He does this audit for a living, and his model is that strategic effectiveness comes down to three things multiplied together. IQ, how good the thinking is. EQ, how well you carry people with you. And FQ, which is his own. Focus.
Yes, it is another three-letter framework, and I have spent years being rude about those. Stay with it, because the third letter is the one doing the work.
Multiplied is the word that matters
Any one of them near zero takes the whole thing down with it. And in most places I have worked, the shaky one is FQ. The strategy is usually fine. The people are usually willing. It is the focus that is not there.
Focus is also the only one of the three that nobody owns. You have a strategy function for IQ. You have HR and engagement and culture covering EQ, more or less. But there is no director of focus.
Aranki's picture for it is a bar stool. Three legs, one always rocking. And what people do is reinforce whichever leg they are already best at. So clever teams throw more thinking at it. Warm teams book another offsite. Both feel like effort, and neither goes near the leg that is wobbling.
Which is how you get to two hundred
Every one of them was an IQ decision. Somebody built a good case, and the case was good. But not one was ever weighed against focus, because there was nothing to weigh it with and nobody whose job it was.
Two hundred projects is two hundred choices handed to everyone in the business with nothing to say which matters more. People are not being difficult. They pick the one closest to them, the one their manager mentioned last, the one they actually understand. So what gets executed is an emergent version of the strategy, assembled out of everybody's individual convenience. Nobody defected. Everyone did something sensible. The aggregate is nonsense.
Aranki's fix is the best thing in the interview. He takes the two hundred away overnight, turns them into Pokémon cards with the cost and the headcount and the duration printed on each, and makes the executive team play top trumps. They are ten years old again inside four minutes, complaining that their deck is worse than everybody else's.
I see this constantly in services
The improvement plan. The transformation workstream. The tooling migration. The quick win I committed to in a QBR eighteen months ago that has never been formally killed. All of it live. All of it technically in progress.
This is the portfolio-level version of a problem I have written about at the level of the working day, where agents removed the point at which work used to stop. Same shape, different altitude. When there is no natural limit and no owner for the limit, the list simply grows until the people underneath it start choosing for themselves.
Nobody is refusing to execute the strategy, they just cannot find it in the list.