Planning 2027? Start With What You'll Stop
Planning season is starting. Over the next two months, leadership teams everywhere will build lists of what they want to accomplish next year. Those lists will be ambitious, well reasoned, and almost entirely additive.
Very few will start with the most useful question: what are we going to stop?
Why should annual strategic planning start with stopping?
Annual strategic planning should start with stopping because capacity is fixed. Every new priority competes for the same people, money, and attention as everything already in flight. If nothing stops, new priorities get starved, existing work gets diluted, and teams burn out. Deciding what to stop first is the only way to make room for what matters.
The stop, start, continue exercise
Do the stop column first, and don't move on until it has real entries. It's the hardest column and the one teams rush. If it's empty, the rest of the plan is a wish list.
Every plan has a hidden cost: everything you didn't stop to make room for it.
How do you make stopping stick?
Name an owner for each stop, just like you would for a start
Tell the organization what's stopping, and why
Reallocate the freed people and budget visibly to new priorities
Check at the mid-year review that stopped work actually stopped
It's the same discipline behind forced-rank prioritization and treating budget season as strategy season, applied at the very start of the cycle.
The takeaway
Open your first 2027 planning session with the stop column. Fill it before anything else. Then build the plan in the space you've created. Guiding leadership teams through planning is one of the core things we do at Kairos Telos.
Frequently asked questions
How do you start annual strategic planning?
Begin by reviewing what's in flight and deciding what to stop, then identify the few new priorities to start, and confirm what continues, before building budgets.
What is a stop, start, continue exercise?
A simple planning method where a team lists activities to stop, new activities to start, and existing ones to continue, forcing explicit tradeoffs.
Why do strategic plans fail?
Often because they add priorities without removing any, leaving teams overloaded and new initiatives under-resourced.
Starting your 2027 planning? Let's begin with what to stop.
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