Before You Set Your 2027 Goals, Look at What's Haunting 2026

We're approaching that familiar time of year when businesses start building next year's budgets, revenue targets, and strategic plans. There's nothing wrong with that. But I sometimes wonder whether we spend too much time planning what we want to add without examining what we ought to eliminate.

Suppose your leadership team has agreed to grow revenue by 15% next year. That may be a perfectly reasonable ambition, but what happens when the additional work moves through the same bottlenecks, unclear handoffs, and overloaded managers you're dealing with today? Growth can magnify a company's existing weaknesses just as efficiently as its strengths.

Before committing to another list of initiatives, I'd spend a little time with three questions. Which activities consume resources without contributing enough value? Which projects would we choose not to start if we were deciding today? And which recurring problems are nobody's clear responsibility? Those conversations can be uncomfortable, but they usually tell you a great deal about whether the business is ready to execute the plan you're preparing.

A new year doesn't automatically give an organization new capacity or better systems. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do for the next twelve months is to stop carrying a few things that should have been left behind in the last twelve.

One useful question:

If we were starting today, what would we stop doing? Ask your leadership team to name one recurring meeting, report, project, or handoff that no longer earns the time it consumes. Then decide who will make the change and when.

Dax Kimbrough | Founder, Convection Consulting