Too many Strategic Initiatives? Start with Capabilities, not Projects
22/09/2026
Recently, after yet another conversation about “priorities” in a project portfolio, I recalled Felix Oberholzer-Gee’s Harvard Business Review article Eliminate Strategic Overload.
In the article, they describe a problem that will sound familiar to many professionals: organizations respond to an increasingly complex environment by launching more strategies, more priorities, and ultimately more initiatives. The result is often an organization working extremely hard on too many things at once, without creating proportionally more value.
His recommendation is deceptively simple: do fewer things, with greater impact.
It’s a powerful idea and difficult to disagree with. But the harder question is: how do you decide what deserves attention? And what does not?
This is where Capability-Based Management can help.
The problem with prioritizing projects and the wish lists within projects
Most organizations translate strategy into initiatives relatively quickly. Customer intimacy becomes a priority? A CRM program appears. Operational efficiency? Let’s automate. AI becomes strategically important? Suddenly dozens of AI use cases compete for attention.
Before long, the project portfolio becomes the de facto representation of the strategy. That creates a problem, because projects are a means to an end, not a goal in themselves.
Projects are temporary and typically scoped around a particular solution, technology, department, or change at a certain moment in time. When we discuss strategy through projects, the prioritization discussion quickly shifts from what the organization needs to which solution or project deserves funding.
We often start discussing the answer before we've properly agreed on the problem.
Capability-Based Management introduces another layer between strategy and projects.
A business capability describes something the organization needs to be able to do. Think Customer Relationship Management, Product Development, Workforce Planning, Data Analytics, or Supply Chain Management.
If the terminology puts you off, think of them simply as relatively stable business domains. Projects come and go. The capabilities they improve mostly remain. That makes capabilities a useful lens for asking more fundamental questions:
“What does our strategy require us to become better at? How much better? How quickly? And which capabilities depend on others?”
Start with a strategic capability vision
Instead of beginning with the project portfolio, start with the organization. Translate strategic objectives into the value streams they require and the capabilities they depend on. Identify which capabilities differentiate the organization in the market and which simply need to meet industry standards. Next, figure out where current performance is already sufficient and where it needs to improve, and to what level.
This creates a strategic capability-based vision: a view of where the organization actually needs to focus. Only then bring the initiatives back in.
Now some interesting questions become possible:
Are we investing in the capabilities that matter most to our strategy?
Are several projects trying to improve the same capability?
Are strategically important capabilities receiving too little attention?
Are we investing heavily in capabilities that do not need to improve?
Are we overlooking dependencies that will prevent other capabilities from evolving?
The conversation changes from: “Which projects should we prioritize?” to “Which capabilities need to evolve for our strategy to succeed. And what is the best way to make that happen?” That last part is important.
Doing less starts with knowing what matters
Capability-Based Management will not make the strategic choices for you. But it provides a structure to make those choices visible and connect them to execution without immediately jumping to solutions.
That is exactly why I believe capabilities are so useful when organizations struggle with strategic overload. Before asking which projects deserve priority, ask a more fundamental question:
“What does our organization actually need to become better at? And once we figure that out, what is the best way forward to realize it? How do we incrementally change these capabilities, taking into account dependencies and prerequisites, without overloading key assets?”
Once that is clear, deciding what to do, and perhaps even more importantly, what not to do, becomes a lot easier.
Want to learn how to put this into practice? In our Leading with Capabilities training, we explore how capability maps, strategic profiles, and other CBM techniques can help translate strategy into concrete priorities for organizational evolution.
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