Stop doing strategy theatre

Carmen Barlow, transformation consultant and co-founder of Charity Charge Collective, has spent years working with charity leaders on transformation. If there are two hills she’s going to die on, they're these:

First: You must be crystal clear about your goals. Not vague aspirations—actual, shared understanding of what success looks like and how it links to your mission. Without that clarity, you create cultures where people compete for resources with no rational way to decide. Where nobody's genuinely accountable because nobody knows what they're being held accountable for. Where your teams burn out producing outputs that don't connect to outcomes, and your beneficiaries suffer because the work isn't focused on impact.

Second: You must resource your decisions. Actually move the money and the people. Otherwise, you're just doing strategy theatre.

Let me tell you what I mean by strategy theatre.

The Prioritisation Dilemma

Here's what we see constantly: Leadership teams who can only say yes.

They'll sit through the analysis. They'll nod at the strategic logic. They'll agree that focus is essential. "Yes," they'll say, "yes, that makes complete sense. Let's prioritise that."

And then? They don't deprioritise anything else.

What they actually mean is: "Yes, do that brilliant new strategic priority... on top of everything you're already doing."

This is where good intentions meet reality and collapse. Because a strategic decision isn't just choosing what to do. It's choosing what to stop doing. And if you're not willing to make that second choice, you haven't actually made a strategic decision at all.

Why This Is So Hard (And Why It Matters Anyway)

I want to be clear: I understand completely why this is so difficult. Nobody wakes up thinking, "Today I'm going to spread my organisation impossibly thin and exhaust my teams." These situations emerge from incredibly good intentions.

The work we do in the charity sector has real people on the other side—beneficiaries who will suffer if we cut a service or programme, communities who depend on us, animals who need care. Every service exists because at some point, someone identified a genuine need. Every programme has people who benefit from it, however imperfectly it's currently delivered.

So when we talk about focus, we're really talking about a version of that philosophical trolley problem: sometimes by letting go of one or two services, you can genuinely improve more lives elsewhere by making your remaining work truly excellent. But that's an agonising decision. Nobody wants to be the person who says, "We're stopping this programme that helps real people."

The result? Organisations spread themselves impossibly thin. They run multiple services and programmes poorly rather than make the brave decision to focus. They ask teams to deliver transformation without transformation resources. They announce strategic priorities without removing any existing priorities.

And the impact? When you refuse to match resources to decisions, everything degrades. Services become under-resourced and ineffective. Staff burn out trying to do impossible work. And paradoxically, you end up helping fewer people because nothing is resourced well enough to genuinely transform lives. Your beneficiaries get watered-down versions of multiple services rather than excellent support in focused areas.

What Real Strategic Decisions Look Like

A real strategic decision doesn't end at choice. It ends at trajectory change.

Here's an example from our research: One CEO made the controversial decision to remove their Finance Director from the top table and create a Director of Transformation position instead.

That's not about whether finance matters (of course it does). It's about sending an unmistakable signal: We will be led by transformation goals, with finance as an enabler, not the other way around.

That's what moving resources looks like. Money and people, literally repositioned to reflect strategic priority.

Compare that with organisations where transformation is "everyone's responsibility"—which usually means it's nobody's actual job, nobody's funded to deliver it, and it never genuinely happens.

What About Partnership?

Here's where I think we miss a crucial opportunity: we don't have to do everything ourselves.

When we're honest about our capacity, we can ask: who else is working in this space? Rather than competing for the same resources to deliver overlapping services and programmes poorly, could we focus on what we do brilliantly and actively partner with others who could pick up the work where we're not making our biggest impact?

This requires a fundamental mindset shift. Instead of "we must serve everyone with everything," it becomes "we'll do these specific things exceptionally well, and we'll work with partners to ensure people can access what we're not providing."

Partnership done well means:

• Being ruthlessly honest about where you genuinely add the most value

• Actively supporting other organisations to pick up work you're stopping

• Collaborating rather than competing for limited resources

• Trusting that the sector as a whole can serve beneficiaries better when we're each focused on our strengths

This is still a brave decision. It means letting go of control. It means accepting that another organisation might serve some beneficiaries better than you could. But it's also a path out of the impossible situation where you're trying to be everything to everyone.

How to Know If You're Doing Strategy Theatre

Ask yourself:

• Have you made a choice? Can you name specifically what you've decided (not what you're exploring or piloting, but what you've committed to)?

• Have you said no to something? If your answer to "what are our priorities?" is more than three things, you don't have priorities. You have a wish list.

• Have you moved money? Can you point to budget that's been reallocated? Not new money you hope to raise—actual existing budget that now funds your strategic priority instead of something else?

• Have you moved people? Has anyone's job actually changed? Has anyone's time been freed up from previous work to focus on your new priority?

• If you can't answer yes to these questions, you're probably doing strategy theatre.

The Accountability Connection

This links directly back to my first hill: clarity of goals. Because here's what happens when you don't move resources to match decisions:

People become unclear about what's genuinely important. They hear about strategic priorities but see that the old work is still expected. So they try to do everything, which means nothing gets done excellently. And then nobody can be held accountable for outcomes because it was never realistic to achieve them in the first place.

You create a toxic culture where people burn out trying to be everywhere at once, where they feel perpetually behind, where they can't point to genuine impact because they're spread too thin to create any.

And your beneficiaries (the people or causes you exist to serve) get a degraded version of your services and programmes across the board instead of excellent support in focused areas.

The Way Forward

Real strategic decisions are risky. They're uncomfortable. They're bets based on the best of our knowledge and predictions, made without perfect information. By saying yes to something, you're explicitly saying no to something else. There's suffering on both sides of that choice (that's why it's genuinely strategic).

But the alternative (pretending you've made a decision whilst refusing to resource it) doesn't avoid that suffering. It just distributes it differently: across exhausted teams, disappointed beneficiaries, and ultimately, organisational failure when you can't sustain the impossible.

So here's my challenge to charity leaders:

Stop doing strategy theatre. Don't pretend you're making strategic decisions if you're not willing to move the resources. Either make the full decision (including the resourcing), or be honest that you're not ready to prioritise yet.

And consider this: Could partnership be your answer? Could focusing on your genuine strengths, whilst actively supporting others to pick up what you're letting go, actually serve more people better than your current impossible attempt to do everything?

Because a decision without resources isn't a decision. It's a wish. And wishes don't transform organisations.

Need support moving from strategy theatre to real transformation? Carmen works with medium and large nonprofits across the UK and Europe to turn strategic intentions into resourced reality. If you're ready to make the difficult decisions and want someone who'll help you work through them honestly, get in touch: carmen@carmenbarlow.com | www.carmenbarlow.com

Carmen Barlow has over a decade of experience supporting charity transformation. This blog is part of the Strategic Decisions and Leadership toolkit, developed through interviews with 50+ charity leaders exploring the five tests of strategic decision-making: Analysis, Choice, Buy-In, Trajectory, and Learning.