There's a question we've started asking. Not "what's your strategy?" or "where are you investing?". Those are easy to answer, even when the answers are wrong. We ask both our clients and ourselves: What have you stopped doing in the last 12 months? 

The silence that follows is telling. Not because the answer is hard to find. Because for most organisations, the answer is: nothing. The calendar fills. The meetings recur. The legacy projects lumber forward on their original logic. And the map, the mental model of how the world works, what customers want, which capabilities matter — quietly expires. 

The accumulation problem

Organisations are extraordinarily good at addition. A new initiative gets added to the portfolio. A new reporting layer appears. A new committee forms to coordinate the committees. What they are structurally bad at is subtraction — retiring the things that made sense in a previous version of the world. 

This isn't laziness. It's a genuine feature of how institutions work. Stopping something requires someone to make a case against something that used to be successful. It means writing off sunk costs, acknowledging that yesterday's bet isn't today's priority, and navigating the politics of the people whose identity is tied to what you're ending. Peter Drucker, who spent decades studying this problem termed it organised abandonment: the deliberate, systematic practice of asking whether each product, process, or priority would still be created if you were starting fresh today. Most organisations never ask the question. 

So organisations don't stop. They layer. And the accumulation of legacy priorities is one of the most reliable early warning signs of an organisation losing its ability to move.