The symptom
A leadership team reviews a quarter and finds, by most visible measures, a great deal happened. Projects launched. Meetings held. Initiatives kicked off. Reports produced on schedule. And yet, when the same team is asked what strategically changed as a result, the answer is considerably less clear than the volume of activity would suggest it should be. Nobody did anything wrong, exactly — the organisation was demonstrably busy. Whether it was busy in a way that moved the strategy forward is a separate question, and one the quarter’s activity metrics don’t actually answer.
The review meeting itself tends to reinforce the confusion. A slide listing everything launched this quarter is genuinely easy to produce and genuinely satisfying to present — it demonstrates visible effort in a way a leadership team can point to with confidence. A slide honestly assessing what strategically moved as a result is harder to produce, more open to disagreement, and considerably less comfortable to sit through, which is part of why the first kind of slide tends to dominate the conversation even when everyone in the room would agree, if asked directly, that it isn’t really answering the question that matters.
What leaders usually conclude
The instinctive read is often that the organisation isn’t moving fast enough, and the response is more activity — more initiatives launched, more meetings to keep momentum visible, a fuller pipeline for the next quarter. This response makes sense if the diagnosis is a shortage of effort. It makes considerably less sense if the actual gap is between the volume of activity and its strategic relevance, in which case adding more activity of the same kind simply produces a busier version of the same disconnect.
There’s a genuine risk of overcorrecting in the other direction too, worth naming honestly: an organisation that becomes preoccupied with proving every piece of activity connects to strategic outcome can talk itself out of the ordinary operational work that any functioning organisation needs, simply because that work doesn’t map neatly onto a strategic narrative. The goal isn’t less activity for its own sake — it’s a clearer view of which activity is actually doing strategic work and which is running in parallel to it.
What the evidence suggests
V. F. Ridgway’s research on performance measurement, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, is directly relevant here. Ridgway documented how quantitative measures — even well-intentioned ones — can produce behaviour that satisfies the measure without advancing the underlying goal it was meant to represent. His examples included employment interviewers evaluated on the number of interviews conducted, who responded by conducting fast interviews and placing fewer applicants than a slower, more careful process would have achieved. The measure was met. The underlying purpose was not well served.
Activity metrics in a strategic context tend to follow a similar shape. Number of initiatives launched, meetings held, or projects in flight are all genuinely easy to measure, and genuinely easy to demonstrate in a leadership review — which is part of why they persist as proxies for progress, even when nobody has explicitly decided that volume of activity should stand in for strategic movement. Steven Kerr’s research on reward systems, published in the Academy of Management Journal, adds a related point: organisations reliably get more of what they measure and less of what they merely hope for, and if activity is what’s visibly tracked while strategic outcome is harder to pin down and therefore tracked less rigorously, the organisation will tend to produce more of the former without a corresponding increase in the latter — not because anyone chose that trade-off deliberately, but because it’s what the measurement system was quietly set up to reward.
There’s a reputational dimension to this too. A team, or an individual leader, that can point to a busy, well-documented quarter has a straightforward story to tell in a review — visible, countable, easy to defend. A team that made slower but more strategically significant progress, with less to show in volume terms, often has a harder story to tell, even when the underlying contribution was larger. Over enough review cycles, this asymmetry can quietly shape which kind of work gets favoured, independent of which kind actually matters more.
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Questions worth considering
- Of the metrics currently used to judge whether the organisation is on track, how many measure volume of activity, and how many measure a strategic outcome that activity was meant to produce?
- If activity increased significantly this quarter with no corresponding change in a genuine strategic measure, would that be visible in the current reporting — or would the activity increase itself read as the good news?
- Is there a difference, currently tracked anywhere, between an initiative launching and an initiative actually changing something?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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