Why Your Executive Team Can't Prioritise (And the Simple Framework That Fixes It)
As a leadership team, you've got a full portfolio. Plenty in flight. But you look around and you can't actually point to where the innovation is happening. Good ideas keep surfacing and then quietly dying. It's hard to get the team aligned on what to focus on and just when you think you've got alignment, the next meeting you're speaking in circles again.
Your teams feel it too. There's a creeping sense that the organisation isn't thinking big enough. That you're so busy keeping things running that there's no room to look up. And when someone does bring something interesting to the table, it gets hit with the typical "we've tried this before" or "but [insert why it won't work]."
Sound familiar?
This is where the 3 Horizons comes in…
McKinsey's Three Horizons framework introduced by Baghai, Coley and White in The Alchemy of Growth back in 1999 — made the argument that organisations need to manage their core business, emerging opportunities, and future bets as parallel streams, each with its own logic.
Sustain: this is the work that makes up the core business. It's about risk management, maintaining the ROI, and keeping it healthy with incremental improvements.
Exploit: you've decided and you're ready to commit. Now it's about resourcing, sequencing, and hitting timelines.
Explore: you haven't decided what you want to do yet. You're still figuring it out. The conversation here needs to be curious, long-term, and with a desire to learn.
The research behind it showed that companies who sustained long-term growth ran all three horizons at the same time — and gave each one its own measures, its own team shape, and its own working style.
We saw this play out last week…
One of our leadership coaches was sitting with an executive team working through their priorities for the quarter. They had a dozen initiatives on the table. Big ones. The kind that get airtime in board packs.
But the conversation kept stalling. A brand new idea that hadn't been validated was getting the same scrutiny as a program running for two years. Something that'd been previously green-lit was being debated like it still required justification.
So we asked them to take a step back and do a little reframe. Instead of just debating every piece of work, he suggested they try the 3 Horizons to assess what should be worked on.
After mapping their initiatives across the three lenses, the penny dropped. Someone said:
"We've been judging our explore ideas with exploit expectations."
That was the unlock.
Something new to try…
This week, try mapping your current initiatives across those three horizons. Just a whiteboard sketch. Sustain on the left. Exploit in the middle. Explore on the right.
Then look at them through three questions.
Is the mix right? Are you balancing the work that keeps the lights on with the work that positions you for what's next?
Are the right people on the right work? Each horizon needs different skills and mindsets — make sure they match.
What needs to stop? Which initiatives need to pause or be killed to make room for the rest?
Love from Neu
P.S. If you'd like someone in the room to help facilitate it, that's what we do. Let's chat.