Busyness is not the same as progress. Teams can be genuinely stretched, consistently delivering work, and still spending most of their time on things that don’t meaningfully advance the company’s strategic priorities. The question “are we working on the right things?” is one of the hardest for a COO to answer — and one of the most important.
Here are five diagnostic approaches.
1. Do a Strategic Theme Audit
List all the active projects and initiatives in your portfolio. For each one, ask: which strategic theme does this serve? If you can’t answer that question, the project may be valuable — but it’s not connected to strategy. A theme audit will typically reveal that 20–30% of active work is either disconnected from strategic priorities or connected to priorities that have since changed.
2. Measure the “Urgent vs Important” Split
Track what percentage of team capacity is consumed by urgent reactive work (support escalations, production bugs, ad hoc requests) versus planned strategic work. If urgent work consistently consumes more than 25–30% of capacity, your teams are in a reactive mode that structurally prevents strategic progress.
3. Check Your Senior Talent’s Allocation
Your senior people should be disproportionately allocated to strategic priorities. If your most experienced team members are primarily solving operational fires, you have an inversion — your strategic engines are under-powered.
4. Ask “What Would We Stop If We Had Less?”
This counterfactual is a useful prioritisation tool. If the company had 20% less capacity next quarter, what would you stop? Whatever survives that cut is your strategic core. Everything that would get cut first is probably not a strategic priority — and yet it’s consuming capacity now.
5. Review the Last Three Quarters of Delivery
Look at what your teams actually delivered over the last three quarters. Map each delivered item to a strategic theme. Where is there delivery concentration? Where are there gaps? If you spent six months shipping features but your strategic priority was “reduce operational complexity,” the delivery-strategy connection has broken down.
