The strategy in the calendar

The problem it solves

Every company has two strategies. One is presented at the planning meeting: grow in a new segment, launch a service, improve the client experience. The other is the one its resources reveal: what leadership spends its week on, where the uncommitted money goes and where its best people are working. When the two diverge, the second one is the one that gets carried out.

The gap shows in concrete details. The initiative declared a priority moves forward in the spare moments of people who already have a full job. This year's budget repeats last year's with small adjustments, without asking whether the split still makes sense. The most capable people stay tied to running the usual operation, because they are the only ones who know how, and the new work falls to whoever happened to be free.

Spreading a little of everything across every priority feels fair, and produces the opposite result: none of them gets enough to move. After a year, leadership concludes the strategy did not work, when in fact it was never funded. And the next time it proposes something new, the team will already know it will not get resources either.

What it covers

A workshop on how a company allocates its scarce resources — leadership time, available money and its most capable people — and on the gap between that allocation and the declared strategy. It is not a budgeting workshop: the budget records the split, and this session questions whether the split matches what the company says it wants to achieve.

The first part is an exercise in evidence. Each participant reconstructs how they divided their week over the past month, and the group reviews where the year's uncommitted spending went and what the people the company trusts most are working on. With those three records on the table, the declared strategy is compared with the one the resources show, priority by priority. What usually emerges is a list of activities funded out of inertia, because they always were, and a priority or two that exists on paper without ever having received an hour or a dollar.

The second part deals with reallocation, which is where strategy stops being a statement. For each chosen priority, the group decides where the time, money and people it needs will come from, with names and dates, and which capacity gets protected so the day-to-day operation does not swallow it in the first difficult week. It also settles who has the authority to move resources between priorities during the year and how often the allocation is reviewed, without waiting for the next budget.

The team leaves with a written comparison between what is declared and what is funded, the list of inertia allocations with a decision on each, and a reallocation plan. Building the budget and tracking it monthly belong to the Finance area; executing priorities once they are funded is covered by Discipline today, results tomorrow. Within ALUD's framework, this workshop takes on a Strategy-engine question that tends to get answered without ever being asked: what pays for each priority.

What participants learn

• Compare declared priorities with where leadership time, available money and the most capable people actually go.
• Identify the activities that receive resources out of inertia rather than by decision.
• Evaluate which priorities are genuinely funded and which exist only on paper.
• Decide where the resources for each chosen priority will be taken from, with names and dates.
• Design an allocation review that does not depend on the annual budget cycle.

Agenda

1. 01The declared strategy and the one the resources show
2. 02Three scarce resources: leadership's diary, available money and the most capable people
3. 03Inertia allocations: what gets funded because it always has been
4. 04Spreading a little across everything and moving nothing
5. 05Funding a priority by withdrawing resources from somewhere else
6. 06Protected capacity for new work against an operation that absorbs everything
7. 07Who can move resources between priorities during the year
8. 08Signs that the split has drifted back to the usual one

What the organisation leaves with

• A written comparison between declared priorities and where time, money and key people actually go.
• A list of inertia allocations, with the decision taken on each.
• A reallocation plan showing where each resource assigned to a priority comes from.
• A written agreement on who may move resources between priorities and how often the allocation is reviewed.