By Gabriel Fonseca, Founder, Blackwood Consulting
Originally published as a Member Feature for the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber of Commerce
In Waterloo Region’s fast-paced business landscape, where startups, manufacturers, and service firms are juggling growth, tech adoption, and talent retention, productivity often gets reduced to a numbers game:
But the most productive organizations aren’t the ones doing the most.
They’re the ones doing the right things, at the right time, for the right reasons.
That’s not just an operational challenge.
It’s a strategic one.
Strategy is often mistaken for lofty visions, five-year roadmaps, or polished slide decks. But real strategy is far more grounded, and arguably more radical than people think.
Strategy isn’t about dreaming bigger. It’s about choosing smaller, on purpose.
I define it simply as:
“The prioritization of limited resources against a crowded field of options.”
Most teams don’t lack effort, creativity, or tools.
They lack the discipline, and often, the courage, to make hard choices about where not to deploy them.
But that discipline depends on more than courage. It depends on clarity.
Teams can’t prioritize effectively without a clear, shared understanding of what success looks like right now.
Start with questions like:
Not sure what your constraint is? Start by asking:
Clarifying your primary constraint is what gives your strategy teeth. Without it, prioritization becomes a guessing game, or worse, a reflection of internal politics rather than actual business needs.
If you can’t answer these clearly, your prioritization process will become reactive.
Strategy starts with focus, and focus starts with alignment on the goal.
Without clear prioritization, productivity turns into performance, a simulation of progress that doesn’t actually compound.
Busy doesn’t equal effective. But many teams are rewarded for being visibly overwhelmed.
A common pushback:
“We can’t afford to say no to that many things.”
But here’s what’s often overlooked:
Trying to do everything is already costing you.
That cost just hides in harder-to-measure places:
Saying yes to everything is often driven by fear:
Saying yes to everything is the most polite form of sabotage. It looks agreeable, but quietly destroys focus.
Making hard trade-offs doesn’t shrink your ambition.
It protects your momentum.
We worked with a B2B SaaS company juggling 17 active initiatives across sales, marketing, product, and customer success, all labeled “top priority.”
Despite massive effort, growth had stalled. No one could explain why.
We ran a two-day strategy alignment sprint:
They narrowed to five initiatives, and focused execution on just two:
The results?
Average deal size grew by 26%
Sales ramp time dropped by 40%
They didn’t work harder.
They stopped working on what didn’t matter.
I’ve seen this play out over and over: cutting initiatives almost always drives more performance, not less.
Yes, their team and market conditions helped, but it was focus that created the space for execution to succeed.
The hardest choices aren’t between good and bad, they’re between two good things.
This is where strategy gets real.
You may face:
Here, the right decision depends on your strategic goal and current constraint.
Ask:
When everything looks good, the best strategy is the one that moves you forward, not sideways.
Great strategy feels risky in the moment, and obvious in hindsight.
Apply this thinking with your team using these steps:
This isn’t just prioritization.
It’s momentum protection.
Deprioritization carries risk, political, emotional, and reputational. But you can navigate it with clarity and empathy:
Be transparent:
“We’re making this change to stay focused on the highest-impact work this quarter.”
Provide closure:
Sunset paused projects intentionally. Don’t let them disappear silently.
Revisit, don’t erase:
Frame paused work as “not now,” not “never again.” Document clearly for future cycles.
Involve stakeholders early:
Use structured feedback to ensure key voices are heard before decisions are final.
Sample language for saying no:
“This idea has merit, but based on current priorities and capacity, we’re choosing to focus elsewhere this quarter. Let’s revisit in our next planning cycle.”
Deprioritization isn’t rejection. It’s strategic respect.
Deprioritization is a leadership skill, and it gets easier with practice.
Let’s be real: This is harder in some contexts.
In nonprofits, government agencies, or early-stage startups, priorities are shaped by:
In these settings, focus can’t always be purely internal or purely rational.
Strategy here requires more than logic, it requires leadership:
Want a practical approach? In one nonprofit we supported, leadership used a strategy sprint to align board, funders, and staff on a single priority for the next six months: improving donor retention by 15%. By isolating that constraint and unifying around it, they protected frontline teams from overload, and earned more trust from funders than they had with broad, scattered effort.
In complex systems, strategy is less about control, and more about coherence.
The most strategic organizations don’t have more ideas.
They’re just more deliberate about choosing fewer, and seeing them through.
Saying “no” to a promising idea, a legacy product, or a well-liked initiative is hard.
But delaying that decision is still a decision, and one that quietly drains momentum.
And yes, for teams who’ve experienced repeated pivots or shifting strategic goals, this can feel like whiplash.
This is where consistency and transparency matter most. Even if the strategy evolves, the decision-making process should remain stable.
That means clearly explaining why changes are being made, and how new choices relate to past ones.
Otherwise, teams disengage not because the vision isn’t clear, but because it doesn’t feel durable.
If your team feels busy but stuck, start here:
These are hard questions.
But they separate busy teams from productive ones.
Productivity isn’t about maximizing output.
It’s about minimizing misalignment.
If your strategy doesn’t make execution easier, faster, and more confident, it’s not a strategy.
It’s a theatre production in slide format.
Decide what matters.
Cut what doesn’t.
That’s the real productivity most organizations are missing.
If this article resonated and you’re wondering how to apply it practically inside your organization, send me a message on LinkedIn. Happy to point you to tools, templates, or walk you through a sample strategy sprint.
