The Goals You UN-set

Every planning cycle looks the same. New initiatives. New markets. New hires. New systems. The energy goes toward what we’re going to build, launch, and add.

These initiatives then get spread out across teams, often with the same resources and budgets.

Spot the problem?

In my experience, where most companies get stuck is when they layer new priorities on top of old ones, new processes alongside legacy workflows, until the organization is buried under the weight of everything it’s committed to. Goals don’t exist in a vacuum. For every bold new initiative, something has to give. And yet the “what do we stop” conversation almost never happens.

Operational cruft

In software development, there’s a term for what happens when programmers layer in new functionality without addressing old code: cruft. It’s part of the technical debt that accumulates over time, making systems harder to scale or maintain. Every shortcut, every patch, every “we’ll fix it later” adds to the pile. Eventually the codebase becomes so tangled that adding anything new takes twice as long as it should.

Businesses accumulate operational cruft the same way:

• Processes that made sense when the business was half its size are now choking it.
• Cumbersome approval chains that exist because of an error someone made five years ago.
• Meetings that persist through sheer inertia despite their rationale disappearing.
• Tools adopted for a specific project that never got sunsetted.

This is the stuff that quietly accumulates, until one day you realize your team is spending half its time on things that don’t matter.

Why stopping is hard

If stopping things were easy, everyone would do it.

The first impediment is visibility. Cruft is often invisible to the people who don’t deal with it directly. Leaders see the new initiative; they don’t see the three legacy processes still running underneath it. The people who do see it often lack the authority or the political capital to kill it.

The second problem is dependencies. Processes build up connections over time. Stop the wrong thing and you might break something downstream, upset a client, or create a gap nobody planned for. The risk isn’t just that stopping feels uncomfortable—it’s that stopping the wrong thing could cause real damage. And quite often it’s hard to unravel what really matters from what doesn’t.

The third problem is identity. People get attached to what they’ve built. Killing a process someone owns may feel like a judgment on their work, or a direct threat to their continued employment. This is where the politics live and why so much cruft survives long past its usefulness.

What stopping actually requires

I’ve led enough transformations to know that subtraction is harder than addition. Adding things is energizing. Stopping things requires a different set of muscles: the willingness to audit what’s actually happening, the judgment to distinguish load-bearing processes from dead weight, and the political will to make the call.

It starts with asking the question explicitly. In every planning cycle, alongside what are we going to do? there should be a parallel conversation: what are we going to stop? What processes no longer serve us? What meetings could disappear tomorrow with no impact? What tools are we paying for that nobody uses? What reports exist only because someone asked for them once three years ago?

Then it requires follow-through. Stopping something means actually stopping it: communicating the change, reassigning resources, updating documentation, and making sure it doesn’t creep back in. This is project management, not just decision-making.

And it requires air cover. People need to know it’s safe to propose killing things. If the culture punishes the person who says “we should stop doing this,” the cruft will keep accumulating.

The payoff

Subtracting cruft doesn’t just free up resources; it forces the organization to articulate what actually matters and to stop pretending everything is a priority.

The best-run companies I’ve worked with treat subtraction as a discipline, not an afterthought. They build it into planning. They reward it. They understand that success often requires taking things off the list.

So the next time you sit down to plan, right after you ask what should we do?, ask what should we stop doing?