The Cost of Too Many Priorities

Is Your Business Funding Progress or Spreading Itself Too Thin?

An Emergent Africa white paper for leaders of large South African listed and privately owned companies

Executive overview

A company can have a compelling strategy, capable executives and substantial investment behind its transformation agenda, yet still struggle to deliver meaningful progress.

One possible explanation deserves closer scrutiny: the business has committed to more priorities than it can realistically execute.

Individually, each initiative may appear sensible. A technology upgrade promises efficiency. A customer programme offers growth. A procurement initiative targets savings. An acquisition creates new possibilities. A reporting project strengthens oversight. Together, however, these commitments can overwhelm the same people, systems and decision processes.

The result is an expensive gap between strategic ambition and organisational capacity.

This paper draws on surveys, research and published analysis from McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, Deloitte and PwC. These sources differ in methodology and geography; their findings should not be treated as a single study of South African companies. They nevertheless provide a useful foundation for examining a shared executive challenge: how to concentrate resources on the work that matters most.

Emergent Africa’s perspective is that prioritisation must produce observable choices. It should determine which outcomes receive funding, which teams receive support, which decisions receive executive attention, and which activities stop.

A shorter presentation is not sufficient. The organisation’s commitments must change.

For South African leadership teams, the opportunity is to improve the return on capital, talent and management time already available, while protecting capacity to build the future.

1. How sensible decisions create an overloaded business

Consider a hypothetical diversified South African group.

Its executive committee approves a commercial growth programme, an enterprise system upgrade, a working capital initiative, sustainability reporting improvements and the integration of a recently acquired business.

Each proposal has a sponsor. Each has an acceptable business case. Each is described as strategically important.

The commercial programme needs better customer data. The system upgrade needs the same data specialists. Working capital improvements require finance and procurement participation. Sustainability reporting depends on operational information. Acquisition integration draws on all these functions.

The projects have separate budgets, but they share scarce execution capacity.

That distinction is easily missed during approval. A business can afford the expenditure while lacking the people, decision speed or operational flexibility required to deliver the work concurrently.

The first signs may appear modest: a delayed workshop, an unavailable executive, a decision carried forward to the next meeting. Over time, these small delays compound. Teams revise schedules, extend supplier engagements and spend more time coordinating unfinished work.

Meanwhile, ordinary business responsibilities continue.

The organisation has created a portfolio of individually defensible commitments that may be collectively undeliverable. Recognising this possibility should be part of strategic oversight before delivery problems become financial disappointments.

2. What the research tells us

The five firms approach this problem from different angles. Their contributions are most useful when read together without overstating what any individual finding proves.

McKinsey: strategic priorities frequently lack full funding

McKinsey’s 2024 resource allocation survey covered 617 executives and managers at companies with revenues of at least US$500 million. Only about half reported effective alignment between budgets and corporate strategy. McKinsey states:

“just 53 percent say their organizations are in the habit of fully funding the priorities they’ve identified.” [1]

This is evidence of a gap between identifying priorities and committing resources to them. The survey also associates stronger alignment with reported outperformance; it does not establish that alignment alone causes superior results.

BCG: simultaneous activity can undermine execution

In its January 2026 analysis of transformation priorities, BCG warns:

“When organizations pile on too many initiatives at the outset, teams lose focus and programs grind to a halt.” [2]

BCG also observes that companies can often capture 80% of transformation value through roughly 20% of initiatives. This is a useful challenge to examine where value is concentrated, not a universal instruction to cancel four out of five projects.

Bain: executive attention can be badly misallocated

Bain’s Managing Initiative Overload describes one company it studied where:

“About 80% of the leadership team’s time went to issues that accounted for less than 20% of the company’s value.” [3]

This is a company example, not a representative statistic for all businesses. Its significance is the question it raises: does management’s actual allocation of time reflect the organisation’s declared priorities?

Deloitte: responsibility is expanding faster than capacity

Deloitte’s 2026 Chief Strategy Officer Survey reports:

“More than half of CSOs surveyed report managing too many priorities with too little time.” [4]

Only 35% said they co-led or fully owned decision-making for their organisation’s top priorities. The findings highlight two distinct constraints: insufficient capacity and limited authority to resolve the choices that influence delivery.

PwC: overlapping programmes create risks that require an enterprise view

PwC’s analysis of programme governance states:

“Transformations rarely happen in isolation — and managing multiple initiatives at once introduces serious risk.” [5]

Separately, PwC reports that actively reallocating staff was associated with higher profitability in its 28th Annual Global CEO Survey. This association supports examining where people are deployed, without assuming that moving employees automatically improves performance. [6]

The practical framework that follows is Emergent Africa’s synthesis and application of these themes, rather than a methodology jointly endorsed by the five firms.

3. The South African leadership challenge

For a large South African company, the prioritisation discussion should begin with its actual operating circumstances.

An industrial group might need to balance plant reliability, logistics alternatives, customer growth and technology investment. A financial services business might face competing demands across customer experience, systems modernisation, risk management and product development. A retailer might be weighing distribution capacity, store investment, digital channels and supplier performance.

These are illustrative situations, not findings about every company in those sectors. Their common feature is that growth and operational resilience draw on overlapping resources.

Ownership also shapes the discussion. A listed company must explain its strategic choices to a broad investor base. A privately owned group may need to balance shareholder expectations, succession considerations and investment across several businesses. Neither structure removes the need to make explicit trade-offs.

PwC’s 2026 Africa CEO research provides regional context. Among African respondents, 75% demonstrated strong commitment to AI adoption, while only 41% had clearly defined AI roadmaps and 26% considered investment sufficient to achieve their AI goals. These are Africa-wide findings, not South Africa-only results. [7]

The implication for an individual company is to test the connection between ambition, preparation and commitment. Announcing another priority does not establish that the organisation is ready to deliver it.

4. Calculate the cost of unfinished work

Initiative expenditure is visible in budgets. The wider cost of carrying too much unfinished work is harder to see.

A delayed procurement improvement postpones savings. A customer initiative that never reaches adoption delays revenue opportunities. An incomplete system migration may require the business to operate old and new processes together.

These costs need to be assessed separately.

First, there is additional delivery expenditure: extended contracts, repeated analysis, extra coordination and rework.

Second, there is the timing of benefits. If a project’s expected contribution arrives six months later, the value of the investment changes even when the total benefit forecast remains unchanged.

Third, there is displacement. Employees assigned to an initiative cannot simultaneously give the same attention to other work. A project with a positive standalone business case may still be a poor use of a scarce specialist compared with another opportunity.

Finally, there is exposure created during transition. Temporary processes, unclear responsibilities or partial implementation may require additional controls.

The CFO should ask each major programme to distinguish these effects. Delayed benefits, lost revenue, cash flow timing and increased costs should not be combined casually into an impressive but unreliable number.

A credible view of overload begins with sound economic definitions.

5. Separate outcomes, initiatives and ordinary responsibilities

An executive agenda becomes difficult to manage when every important activity is labelled a strategic priority.

There are at least three different concepts to distinguish.

An outcome is a business result, such as improved cash conversion, stronger customer retention or profitable entry into a new market.

An initiative is a defined intervention intended to help achieve that result.

An ongoing responsibility is work the business must continue to perform, such as maintaining service, operating controls or managing established customer relationships.

The distinction matters because an organisation may have a small number of strategic outcomes supported by many initiatives. Simply counting projects does not reveal whether it is overloaded.

Equally, relabelling forty projects under four strategic themes does not reduce the work involved.

The leadership team should be able to explain how each initiative contributes to an outcome, what evidence would demonstrate success, and what operational capacity it consumes.

Mandatory work needs explicit treatment. Safety, legal and essential control obligations cannot be discarded because another project has a more attractive financial return. Their scope, sequencing and implementation approach can still be examined carefully.

The aim is a realistic portfolio that recognises both strategic choice and unavoidable responsibility.

6. Make competing commitments visible

A practical starting point is a shared inventory of significant change commitments across the business.

This inventory should include work already approved, work underway and proposals likely to require resources soon. It should also identify initiatives operating informally outside the central programme structure.

For each item, record its intended outcome, accountable owner, remaining expenditure, expected benefits, critical dependencies and demand on scarce roles.

The emphasis should be on decision usefulness. A lengthy register that nobody trusts or uses will create another administrative burden.

Start with the information required to answer a concrete question: can these commitments be delivered together?

For example, three projects might all assume access to the same finance team during year-end preparation. A marketing launch may depend on technology functionality that will not be available in time. An acquisition integration programme may rely on managers already accountable for stabilising service.

Such conflicts should be discussed before each programme independently revises its schedule.

Visibility does not require complete certainty. An honest estimate with stated assumptions is more useful than a precise-looking figure that conceals an unresolved dependency.

The first success measure is whether the inventory leads to better decisions.

7. Evaluate the portfolio against explicit criteria

Once commitments are visible, executives need a consistent basis for comparison.

A useful assessment considers strategic contribution, economic value, urgency, feasibility and the consequences of delay.

Strategic contribution asks which agreed outcome the work advances. Economic value considers the scale, timing and confidence of benefits. Urgency distinguishes a genuine deadline from a sponsor’s preference. Feasibility examines whether the necessary capabilities and dependencies are available.

The consequences of delay deserve particular attention. Some initiatives lose little value if postponed. Others depend on a narrow market opportunity, a contractual commitment or a critical sequence of operational changes.

Leadership teams should avoid reducing every decision to a single score.

Scoring can structure discussion, but it can also conceal weak assumptions. A proposal with optimistic revenue projections should not automatically outrank an enabling investment whose benefits are shared across several programmes.

Use ranges where uncertainty is material. Record why an initiative is prioritised and what new evidence might alter the decision.

The value of a common framework is that sponsors must explain their cases on comparable terms. Final judgement remains an executive responsibility, particularly where financial, strategic and operational considerations pull in different directions.

8. Protect the foundations that make other priorities possible

Some work creates value by enabling other work.

Examples include establishing consistent customer records, improving asset information, clarifying supplier ownership or creating dependable performance measures.

These initiatives can be disadvantaged when every project is judged only on its direct, isolated return. A customer growth programme may receive funding while the data improvements it depends on remain under-resourced.

The result is a portfolio that looks commercially attractive but lacks essential foundations.

Executives should therefore examine dependencies before finalising investment choices. An enabling initiative should have named beneficiaries, a defined scope and a clear explanation of the outcomes it supports.

This does not justify unlimited foundational programmes. “Fixing the data” is too broad to be an investment proposition on its own.

A better commitment might specify which customer records require improvement, which business decisions depend on them, who will maintain them and how fitness for use will be tested.

The same discipline applies to sustainability information, financial reporting and operational planning.

Foundations deserve protection when their contribution is explicit. They also deserve the same scrutiny over cost, ownership and delivery as any other investment.

9. Match commitments to available capacity

Capacity planning should extend beyond a total headcount figure.

Ten available employees do not necessarily provide the capability of one experienced architect, plant specialist or finance integration lead. The bottleneck may be a specific skill, a decision-maker or a team that carries essential operational responsibilities.

For each major initiative, identify the roles that could constrain progress. Estimate the demand on those roles alongside their existing duties and foreseeable peak periods.

Then test the portfolio against those constraints.

Possible responses include changing the sequence, reducing scope, assigning alternative resources, obtaining external support or delaying approval. Each response has trade-offs.

External support, for example, can add expertise but may still require substantial internal time for decisions, information and implementation. Moving a launch date can protect quality but may reduce commercial value.

Capacity also needs room for uncertainty. A plan that assumes every specialist is continuously available leaves little ability to respond to disruption.

The appropriate reserve will vary by business and role. What matters is that leadership makes the assumption explicit.

A commitment is more credible when the organisation can show who will deliver it, when they will be available and which competing demands have been resolved.

10. Create a disciplined way to pause and stop

Stopping an initiative is difficult when it has a powerful sponsor, a long history or visible expenditure.

A useful review separates money already spent from the remaining decision. The relevant question is whether future expenditure and effort remain justified by the expected benefits and alternatives.

Some initiatives should continue. Others should be narrowed, combined, paused or closed.

Each decision requires a different response.

Pausing should identify the conditions for restart, the person responsible for preserving useful work and any costs that continue during the pause. Closing should address contractual obligations, operational consequences, knowledge retention and the release of resources.

A project is not truly stopped if its team continues preparing reports and attending governance meetings.

Executives should also distinguish disciplined cancellation from avoidable failure. An early decision based on new evidence can protect value. Penalising every sponsor whose project closes may encourage people to hide uncertainty and keep weak initiatives alive.

A healthy portfolio review gives leaders permission to recommend withdrawal when the facts support it.

The organisation should be able to point to specific commitments it has removed, and explain where the released capacity has gone.

11. Align accountability with decision authority

Naming an accountable executive does not automatically give that person the authority needed to deliver.

A programme owner may be responsible for an outcome while depending on several functions that control funding, people or operational decisions. When priorities conflict, accountability can become an exercise in escalation.

The executive committee should clarify which decisions sit with the initiative owner, which require functional agreement and which must be resolved at enterprise level.

It should also set expectations for decision timing. A programme cannot maintain a credible delivery schedule if important choices remain unresolved indefinitely.

The CEO’s role is especially important when business units have individually reasonable but incompatible priorities. The CFO contributes financial discipline. The COO tests operational practicality. Technology, people and strategy leaders contribute the implications for their respective capabilities.

Together, they must make a decision for the enterprise.

Board oversight should focus on the quality of these choices and their consequences. Useful questions include whether management has identified the main constraints, whether benefits remain credible, and whether major changes in direction are supported by evidence.

Governance should make difficult decisions possible and timely.

12. Measure realised value and decision needs

A programme can be busy, well documented and apparently on schedule without delivering the intended business result.

Leadership reviews should distinguish activity, implementation and outcomes.

Completing training is an activity. Employees consistently using a new process is an implementation result. Reduced errors or improved service may be the business outcome.

All three can matter, but they answer different questions.

For each priority, establish a small set of measures that reveal whether the underlying business change is occurring. Agree a baseline and specify who validates the result.

Benefits should also be reconciled across programmes. If procurement and working capital initiatives both claim the same inventory improvement, the group must avoid counting it twice.

Review meetings should concentrate on material deviations, changed assumptions and decisions needed. A repeated explanation of why a milestone slipped is less valuable than a clear proposal to recover, rescope or stop.

Executives should leave knowing what was decided, who will act and when the consequences will be reviewed.

Reporting earns its place when it improves action. Its purpose is to help leadership direct the business with better evidence.

13. Treat employee capacity as a strategic consideration

The practical demands of change are experienced by people.

An employee may be expected to learn a new system, maintain customer service, contribute to a process redesign and provide information for several programmes at once. Each project plan may assume that the additional effort is manageable.

The combined demand may tell a different story.

Leadership teams should assess which employee groups are affected, how changes overlap and whether managers have the time and support to help implementation succeed.

This creates a useful connection between strategy execution and employee wellbeing. A workload problem requires decisions about work, expectations and resources. Wellbeing support can complement those decisions, but it cannot remove contradictory commitments.

The CHRO should participate in portfolio discussions with evidence about critical roles, implementation demands and employee feedback. Operational leaders should identify where change threatens service continuity or essential controls.

Sensitive health information should remain appropriately protected; portfolio planning generally needs aggregated capacity and workload information.

The objective is sustainable performance. A delivery model that relies on prolonged exceptional effort should be challenged before that effort becomes an unspoken operating assumption.

14. Use technology to support executive discipline

A strategy execution platform can provide a common place to connect strategic outcomes with the work intended to deliver them.

Before selecting or configuring technology, however, the leadership team should agree its management approach.

What qualifies as a strategic initiative? Who owns an outcome? What evidence supports a status update? Who can change a commitment? How will conflicting demands be resolved?

Without agreement on these questions, a platform may simply consolidate inconsistent information.

The business should define the visibility it needs across priorities, responsibilities, milestones, performance and unresolved decisions. It should also determine how information will be maintained without excessive manual administration.

Technology is most useful when it supports a regular executive conversation about delivery and value.

Data quality remains essential. Different definitions of the same customer, supplier, asset or performance measure can undermine confidence in what leaders see. The responsibility for trustworthy information must sit alongside the responsibility for reporting it.

A platform can make the chosen management discipline easier to sustain. The decisions themselves still require judgement, evidence and leadership commitment.

15. A practical 90-day reset

An organisation does not need to suspend its strategy process to improve focus. A structured 90-day review can create a workable starting point.

Days 1–30: establish the facts. Agree the outcomes that matter most over the relevant planning horizon. Build the inventory of major commitments, identify shared dependencies and assess demand on the most constrained roles. Review what evidence supports each benefit forecast.

Days 31–60: make portfolio choices. Compare initiatives using agreed criteria. Confirm mandatory commitments. Decide what to accelerate, sequence differently, narrow, pause or stop. Record the effect on budgets, people, operational responsibilities and expected results.

Days 61–90: embed the decisions. Update plans and accountabilities. Communicate what has changed and why. Establish a concise review cycle that focuses on exceptions, benefits and decisions. Confirm that resources released from discontinued work have actually become available.

The reset should end with fewer unresolved conflicts and more credible commitments.

Its success should not be measured by the number of projects removed alone. A business may retain many initiatives while substantially improving sequencing, ownership and feasibility.

The test is whether its most important outcomes now have a better chance of being achieved.

16. Five questions for the next executive committee meeting

A focused discussion can begin with five questions:

1. Which outcomes matter most, and could each executive explain them consistently?
2. Where have we committed the same scarce people or capabilities more than once?
3. Which initiatives would we decline today if they were presented as new proposals?
4. What have we stopped or deferred to create capacity for our current priorities?
5. What evidence shows that our strategic investments are producing business value?

These questions should lead to named actions and decisions, rather than another general discussion about alignment.

The first question tests shared direction. The second tests feasibility. The third challenges inherited commitments. The fourth tests whether prioritisation has changed behaviour. The fifth tests whether execution is producing the intended result.

Leadership teams can revisit them at major planning points and whenever conditions materially change.

Used consistently, they help make prioritisation part of how the business is managed.

17. Emergent Africa’s perspective

Emergent Africa’s view is that effective strategy execution requires a continuing connection between choices, resources, accountability and results.

That connection becomes harder to maintain as organisations grow across business units, markets and systems. It also becomes more valuable.

A company seeking to improve execution should examine its strategic portfolio, the quality of the information used to manage it, and the capacity of its people to deliver.

These concerns align with Emergent Africa’s work in strategy and strategy execution, Master Data Management as a Service, ESG advisory and reporting, and employee wellbeing, including the Fractional Chief Wellbeing Officer offering.

The relevance of each depends on the organisation’s actual constraints. Some businesses need sharper strategic choices. Others need dependable data, clearer ownership or a more realistic approach to organisational capacity.

Emergent Africa has developed Meridian, its Strategy Execution Platform, as part of its focus on helping organisations turn strategic intent into results.

For a leadership team reviewing an overloaded agenda, the starting point is a demanding but practical question:

Which commitments deserve our best resources, and what must change to give them a credible chance of success?

The answer should be visible in the company’s investment decisions, management attention and daily execution.

References

[1] McKinsey & Company. Tying short-term decisions to long-term strategy. 20 May 2024. Global survey of 617 executives and managers; fieldwork conducted in October 2023.
Read the research

[2] Boston Consulting Group. The Power of Priorities: Why Less Is More in a Transformation. 9 January 2026.
Read the analysis

[3] Bain & Company. Jenny Davis-Peccoud, Michael Mankins and Jeff Denneen. Managing Initiative Overload. 6 March 2014.
Read the analysis

[4] Deloitte. Amid Persistent Volatility, Chief Strategy Officers Face Rising Expectations and Limited Bandwidth. 12 February 2026. Summary of the 2026 Chief Strategy Officer Survey.
Read the survey findings

[5] PwC. Are you really in control? Three questions about program governance and delivery risk. 15 August 2025.
Read the analysis

[6] PwC. Reinventing your company for growth. 29 April 2025. Includes findings from PwC’s 28th Annual Global CEO Survey.
Read the research and analysis

[7] PwC. 29th Global CEO Survey: Africa perspective. 5 February 2026.
Read the Africa findings