Fewer Priorities, Faster Progress

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Hi Reader

A friend told me recently that their business had identified forty‑eight strategic priorities. Forty‑eight! And that wasn’t the full list of work.

It sounds extreme, but it’s not unusual. I’ve seen businesses with way more – one had over a hundred current strategic priorities, with many other lesser priorities logged in a spreadsheet but still expected to progress.

But when you're trying to move this many "priorities", focus fragments and everyone's busy without any real movement. Which means frustratingly, we never the get outcomes we wanted.

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We keep falling for it

Every business has more good ideas than it can realistically move. So why do we find it so hard to prioritise?

I’ve seen many reasons come to the surface, including:

• Fear of missing out – because keeping everything feels safer than closing doors.
• A need to signal effort and ambition – a long list looks impressive.
• Spreading attention feels like an insurance against being wrong.
• The belief that a capable leader should be able to hold it all.
• Strategies that are so loose that everything feels "strategic”

But they all create the same effect: We start lots and finish little.

We have good intent, but end up overstretched with too many plates to spin. We plan, we track, we juggle – putting our best efforts in to organising what was never manageable – and we wonder why progress feels slow.

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It's all about outcomes

The natural reaction is often to try to create better prioritisation. That’s well-meant, but it can often become a false test of right or wrong. Or we create complex models to weigh and score options, as if there’s one perfect answer.

We might create useful conversations, but the sharper question is this:

Which outcomes would create the biggest, fastest shift in your business?

We won’t find that answer by juggling big projects. The better move is to reframe how we look at the work. Yes, the strategy might be big and ambitious. But progress depends on breaking it into smaller, outcome‑focused steps that can be delivered within a clear rhythm.

Even within a big strategic project, there’s usually a smaller outcome we can move on quickly. Something concrete, visible and measurable. And when we start to let the cadence we work in shape that thinking – asking what’s most important this week, what matters this quarter, and what can wait – it resets what we mean by priority.

This shift doesn’t just help leaders. It makes the path clearer for teams too. They know what outcome to drive now, what’s coming up next, and what's paused until later. So we spend less time juggling an impossible list of priorities and more energy on delivering real outcomes.

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What choice will you make?

If you're slicing time thin across a long list of strategic priorities, you’ll see the same pattern: work in progress everywhere, but outcomes still out of sight.

But progress doesn’t come from spreading attention – it comes from finishing something. And you do that by breaking priorities into smaller, outcome‑focused bursts and completing them inside a regular rhythm.

Because a real priority is a choice you protect while other good things wait, not another spreadsheet.

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Big shifts don’t happen solo – they need the right support.

→ Whether you need focused 1:1 coaching, a strategic partner alongside your team, or experienced guidance through a bigger transformation – I've got an option designed to help you accelerate your biggest outcomes.

Explore them here: sparkedambition.co.uk​

And to cut straight to a conversation, just hit reply and let’s talk.

Stay ambitious.

Rob

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Sparked Ambition Ltd | ​linkedin.com/in/robstubbs​