Across government and many industries, productivity is back at the centre of the conversation as a practical concern for leaders navigating tighter budgets, workforce pressures and growing expectations to deliver tangible outcomes.
What we are seeing consistently is this: productivity challenges are rarely about effort or intent. They are about focus and clarity.
When organisations lack clarity on priorities, capability is diluted and delivery becomes fragmented. Teams work hard but progress is slow and harder to see, measure or sustain. In this environment, even well-designed strategies struggle to turn into meaningful outcomes.
The need for strategic focus
There is a growing acknowledgement that productivity can be heavily impacted by the amount of focus on good strategy and effective prioritisation.
A Harvard Business School study on how CEOs manage their time found that leaders who set explicit priorities, design their calendars around those priorities and regularly review how they actually spend their time are far more likely to devote the majority of their hours to strategic work rather than reactive tasks. This means more time on the stuff the matters, and less time on the pieces that can be delegated or fixed with a more considered approach.
We are seeing an emerging trend where leaders are asking harder questions:
- Are our priorities explicit, understood and consistently communicated?
- Do our plans clearly articulate what matters most, and just as importantly, what does not?
- Are we aligning effort, capability and investment to those priorities or spreading resources too thin?
This shift reflects the idea that productivity is no longer being framed as simply doing more with less. It is about focus on doing the right work, in the right order, with the right capability.
Why this matters now
The stakes are high. When priorities are unclear:
- Delivery teams struggle to make defensible trade-offs.
- Leaders are pulled into constant escalation and re-direction.
- Capability uplift efforts fail to stick because they are not anchored to real work.
- Progress becomes difficult to measure, eroding confidence internally and externally.
Conversely, when priorities are clearly defined and consistently reinforced:
- Decision-making becomes faster and more confident.
- Capability development is targeted and purposeful.
- Delivery effort is focused on outcomes that matter most.
- Organisations can clearly articulate progress and course-correct early when needed.
In a constrained environment, clarity is not a ‘nice to have’. It is necessary and a productivity multiplier.
What we are seeing in practice
Through our work across strategy and business planning, several common patterns continue to emerge.
We often see leaders with:
- Strong strategic intent, but limited translation into actionable priorities.
- Long lists of initiatives without clear sequencing or ownership.
- Competing demands placed on the same critical workforce cohorts.
- Difficulty articulating how success will be measured beyond activity completion.
We also see the consequences when these challenges aren’t addressed. When leaders take the time to clearly define priorities, align them to capability and embed them into business planning, delivery confidence improves. Teams understand how their work contributes to outcomes. Leaders have a shared language for decision-making. Progress can be tracked, discussed and adjusted with greater transparency.
Where strategy and business planning make the difference
Effective strategy and business planning is not about producing more documents. It is about creating a clear line of sight from intent to delivery.
This may involve:
- Clearly articulating up to three strategic priorities that genuinely guide decisions.
- Translating those priorities into realistic, sequenced plans that reflect workforce and delivery constraints.
- Ensuring resourcing and investment of effort is prioritised and assessed against strategic priorities.
- Supporting alignment of leaders as a cohort to be equipped to deliver clarity in messaging and priorities consistently and confidently.
- Establishing practical measures that track progress against priorities, not just activity.
When done well, this creates a shared understanding of what success looks like and how progress will be measured, enabling leaders to steer with confidence.
Why now?
The first quarter of a new year is a natural point for reflection and reset. For many leaders, it is an opportunity to move away from constant churn and reactive decision-making and instead invest time upfront to plan and test whether priorities are clear, aligned and genuinely actionable.
Clarity of priorities sets organisations up for success. It strengthens productivity, focuses capability and improves delivery outcomes in a way that is both measurable and sustainable.