Your 2027 Plan Needs a List of Work That Will Stop

An approved priority is a claim on capacity

As 2027 budgets move toward approval, leadership teams face a practical test. Can they name what the organization will stop doing to deliver the new plan?

Most planning processes make additions visible. New markets. New systems. New reporting requirements. New commitments to customers. The work displaced by those additions often remains unnamed.

That omission is an organizational health issue, not simply a scheduling problem. When leaders approve more work without resolving capacity, they transfer the trade-off downward. Managers decide which deadlines to miss. Specialists decide which reviews to shorten. Customer-facing teams explain delays they did not authorize.

McKinsey’s research links organizational health with long-term performance and emphasizes how organizations align, execute and renew themselves.^[1] A practical implication for planning is straightforward: agreement on priorities is incomplete without agreement on the capacity those priorities require.

A funded initiative is not necessarily a feasible initiative. Money can be approved immediately. Experienced people, management attention and operational readiness cannot always be added on the same timetable.

Look for work that has no agreed ending

The overload is rarely confined to the initiatives listed in the strategy presentation. It sits in recurring reports, standing committees, temporary controls that became permanent, and projects kept alive because nobody wants to disappoint their sponsor.

Research discussed in Harvard Business Review’s “The Overcommitted Organization” describes the demands created when people belong to multiple teams. Sharing expertise can bring benefits, but competing schedules and repeated shifts in attention create costs that individual project plans can miss.^[2]

For an organizational health review, examine three places where those costs become visible:

• Shared specialists. Which people or small teams appear in several critical delivery plans for the same period?
• Inherited obligations. Which recurring activities continue without a current decision-maker confirming their value?
• Unresolved dependencies. Which teams have committed to outcomes that depend on work another team has not accepted or scheduled?

Use existing project plans, budget assumptions and conversations with accountable leaders. Do not turn the exercise into individual activity monitoring. The question is whether commitments fit the available capacity, not whether employees look busy.

Ask for specific examples. “We are stretched” is difficult to act on. “The same regulatory team must support three launches in March” gives executives a decision to make.

Make subtraction part of approval

Before approving a major 2027 initiative, require its sponsor to state what capacity it needs, where that capacity will come from, and who has agreed to release it.

Then ask for the corresponding stop, reduction or deferral decision. Name the work. Name the accountable executive. Set the effective date. Record the consequence the business is accepting.

For example, a commercial expansion might require deferring an internal reporting redesign. That choice may leave leaders with less convenient information for another quarter. The trade-off is real. Pretending both efforts can proceed without conflict does not remove it.

Some work cannot be stopped. Legal duties, safety controls and essential customer obligations are not discretionary capacity reserves. Where those constraints bind, leadership must change scope, timing or resources instead.

Recurring meetings deserve scrutiny too, but cancelling meetings is not a substitute for cancelling obligations. Harvard Business Review’s “Stop the Meeting Madness” treats meeting improvement as a collective change effort, rather than an individual time-management fix.^[3] If a committee disappears while its approvals remain mandatory, the work may simply move into scattered calls and messages.

Make the release of capacity explicit. A stopped report should no longer be requested informally. A deferred project should not retain an unofficial deadline. Otherwise, the announced reduction will not change the workload.

Test whether the decision holds

The strongest evidence comes after the planning meeting. Can an executive protect an agreed trade-off when a powerful colleague asks for the discontinued work?

For the next operating review, examine a small set of approved additions and their associated reductions. Confirm whether the old work actually ended, whether the receiving team gained the promised capacity, and whether any material risk emerged.

Treat exceptions as decisions to revisit openly. A genuine customer or regulatory need may justify restarting work. If it does, identify what changes elsewhere. Do not quietly restore the old obligation while leaving every new commitment intact.

Boards should ask management where the plan depends on the same scarce expertise across several initiatives. CEOs should make clear that surfacing such conflicts is expected before delivery fails.

Organizational health is visible in whether people can raise a capacity conflict and obtain a clear decision. Before signing off on 2027, ask each executive for one commitment that has genuinely ended—not merely moved out of the presentation.