We Keep Saying Yes to the Wrong Things (And It's Killing Our Strategy)

Right, let's talk about something that's happening in your organization right now.

Someone just walked into a leadership meeting with a "brilliant" idea. It sounds good. It feels urgent. The person presenting it is charismatic and well-connected.

And you're about to say yes.

Not because it's the most strategic use of your team's time. Not because it's been properly evaluated against your other priorities. But because it passed the most dangerous test in business: it sounds reasonable in the moment.

I've watched this pattern destroy more strategies than market disruption ever could. Organizations that have clear strategic priorities, solid execution capabilities, and talented teams—but can't seem to make meaningful progress because they keep getting distracted by shiny objects.

The problem isn't that these ideas are terrible. It's that they're good enough to justify, but not good enough to prioritize.

The Tyranny of "Sounds Good"

Here's what typically happens in most approval processes:

Someone presents an initiative. Leadership asks a few clarifying questions. If no one can think of an obvious reason to say no, the project gets approved. Work begins. Resources get allocated. Teams start executing.

What's missing? Any systematic way to evaluate whether this is the best use of your organization's finite capacity.

Instead, decisions get made based on:

The Loudest Voice – The most persistent or senior person in the room wins, regardless of strategic merit.

Urgency Theater – Everything is presented as urgent, so urgency becomes meaningless as a decision criteria.

Gut Feel Politics – Leaders make calls based on intuition, personal relationships, or what "feels right" without objective comparison.

Default Yes Culture – Saying no feels negative or unsupportive, so teams default to approval and hope capacity sorts itself out.

The result? Your roadmap becomes a collection of reasonable ideas rather than a focused set of strategic bets.

Why This Destroys Execution

I worked with a 120-person game studio that had 60+ initiatives in flight. When we audited them, we found that most had been approved individually—each one making sense in isolation. But collectively? They were cannibalizing each other.

The team was spread so thin across "good ideas" that they couldn't properly resource any of them. Strategic projects dragged. Quality suffered. Morale tanked.

The problem wasn't the individual decisions. It was the absence of a decision system.

When you say yes based on gut feel rather than strategic filters, you're not making priorities—you're just accumulating work. And accumulated work, no matter how well-intentioned, rarely delivers transformational results.

The Scorecard Solution

The answer isn't to become more conservative or risk-averse. It's to become more systematic.

Every initiative that reaches your approval process should be evaluated using the same objective criteria. Not politics. Not charisma. Not who's asking.

Here's the framework I use with clients—what I call the Initiative Scorecard:

Strategic Fit (0-5) – Does this directly support one of our current strategic priorities? Not tangentially related—directly supportive.

Expected Value (0-5) – What's the potential impact on customers, revenue, or organizational capability? Be specific about the upside.

Readiness (0-5) – Do we have the clarity, resources, and organizational alignment to execute this well right now?

Cost to Serve (0-5) – What's the true resource investment—not just the obvious costs, but the hidden complexity and opportunity cost?

Risk Profile (0-5) – What could go wrong, and how would we mitigate it? Higher scores for lower-risk initiatives.

Each proposal gets scored across these dimensions. Add them up. Compare the totals.

Suddenly, decisions become less emotional and more strategic.

Making It Work in Practice

The scorecard only works if you use it systematically—not just when it's convenient.

Score in Groups, Not Silos – Don't let individual leaders score proposals alone. Bring the relevant stakeholders together. Use discussion to calibrate understanding and surface assumptions.

Force Explicit Tradeoffs – When someone wants to add a new initiative, require them to identify what they're willing to pause or deprioritize. Make the opportunity cost visible.

Share the Criteria – Don't make the scoring rubric a secret. Share it with anyone who might propose initiatives. Let them self-assess before bringing ideas forward.

Track Accuracy Over Time – After initiatives are complete, review whether the original scorecard predictions held up. Use those insights to refine your criteria.

The goal isn't perfect prediction. It's consistent evaluation.

The Cultural Shift

Implementing scorecard-based decision making isn't just operational—it's cultural.

You're moving from "let's try everything" to "let's choose carefully." From "this sounds good" to "this scores well." From political decisions to principled ones.

Some people will resist this. They'll argue that you can't quantify everything. That innovation requires risk-taking. That analysis paralysis is worse than imperfect action.

They're not entirely wrong. But they're missing the point.

The scorecard isn't about eliminating risk or innovation. It's about ensuring that when you take risks, they're strategic risks. When you innovate, you're innovating in service of your priorities.

Real-World Results

I've seen organizations transform their execution simply by implementing consistent scoring:

A SaaS team reduced their active initiatives from 35 to 12—and saw product-market fit work accelerate because distractions were eliminated.

A consulting firm started using scorecards for client engagements and discovered they'd been taking on low-value work out of habit rather than strategy.

A startup applied this framework to feature requests and found that 70% of their backlog wasn't actually aligned with their core user journey.

In each case, the breakthrough wasn't better ideas—it was better decision-making.

The Discipline of Strategic No

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most organizations know what they should be working on. The problem is they can't say no to everything else.

The scorecard gives you permission to be strategic about rejection. When an initiative scores poorly, it's not a personal judgment—it's a strategic outcome based on shared criteria.

That makes saying no easier, clearer, and less political.

And strategic no is just as important as strategic yes.

Making It Stick

Start small. Pick 5-10 pending initiatives. Score them using the framework. See what rises to the top. See what sinks to the bottom.

Use those results to guide your next planning cycle. Track whether the high-scoring initiatives actually deliver better results than the low-scoring ones.

Refine the criteria based on what you learn. But don't abandon the system because it's imperfect.

Remember: the goal isn't to optimize every decision. It's to stop making obviously suboptimal ones.

Most organizations fail not because they can't execute good ideas, but because they execute too many mediocre ones. The scorecard helps you tell the difference.

And that difference might be the key to turning your strategy from a document into reality.

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