I’ve been noticing something for years, although I don’t think I had a name for it when I first started seeing it.
An organization would call because attendance was down, subscriptions had softened, donor growth had stalled, or marketing simply felt harder than it used to. We would sit down together and begin talking about what was happening, and before long someone would start describing the strategy. Except they weren’t really describing a strategy. They were describing activity.
The newsletter was going out every month. Social media was active. Advertising was happening. Posters were being distributed. The website had recently been updated. There was often a long and impressive list of things that people were doing. Sometimes the list was so extensive that I found myself wondering how anyone was finding time to sleep.
This isn’t unique to arts organizations, but the arts sector does seem particularly vulnerable to it. Most organizations operate with limited resources and large ambitions. There are audiences to serve, artists to support, funders to satisfy, boards to inform, communities to engage, and administrative requirements that seem to reproduce quietly overnight. Under those conditions, activity can become reassuring. When there is too much to do, doing something feels better than doing nothing.
The challenge is that activity and strategy are not the same thing, even though we often speak as though they are.
What’s interesting is how easy it is to confuse them. Activity is visible. You can point to it. You can measure it. You can schedule it. Entire meetings can be devoted to discussing it. Strategy is much harder to see. In fact, when strategy is working well, it can appear almost invisible because what people experience are the decisions that flow from it rather than the strategy itself.
I suspect this is one of the reasons organizations talk so much about busyness. Busyness is concrete. Everyone understands it. Ask someone how things are going and the answer is rarely “strategically focused.” It is much more likely to be “busy,” “swamped,” or “flat out.” We wear busyness almost as a professional credential. It has become a way of demonstrating commitment, importance, and value. If our calendars are overflowing, surely we must be doing something important.
Of course, anyone who has ever spent an afternoon reorganizing a desk instead of dealing with a difficult decision understands that activity and progress have a complicated relationship.
Organizations experience a version of the same phenomenon. A great deal can be happening while very little is actually moving forward. Reports can be written. Committees can meet. Campaigns can launch. Content can be created. The organization can be in constant motion and still remain uncertain about what it is trying to accomplish or why certain efforts matter more than others.
I don’t think this happens because people are careless. Quite the opposite. Most of the people I meet in organizations are thoughtful, hardworking, and deeply committed to their missions. If anything, the confusion arises because they care. When people care about outcomes, they naturally want to help. New ideas emerge. New initiatives appear. Opportunities arrive. Reasonable suggestions accumulate. Before long, the organization is carrying a remarkable number of worthwhile projects, each of which has a perfectly sensible explanation for why it should continue.
What rarely receives the same level of attention is the question of what should stop.
That question tends to make people uncomfortable. Starting something feels optimistic. Stopping something feels like admitting defeat, even when it isn’t. Yet I’ve become convinced that many strategic challenges are actually questions of subtraction rather than addition. Organizations often assume they need another initiative, another platform, another campaign, another communication channel. Sometimes what they need is a smaller number of priorities pursued with greater consistency.
One of the most revealing moments in planning conversations often occurs when I ask a seemingly simple question: what are we actually trying to achieve?
The answers are usually thoughtful. They are also frequently numerous. Audience growth. Revenue growth. Community impact. Accessibility. Visibility. Sustainability. Donor retention. Educational outcomes. Membership growth. Partnerships. Advocacy. None of these are unreasonable objectives. In fact, most of them are admirable. The difficulty emerges when they are all treated as equally important at the same time.
At that point, strategy quietly disappears and activity takes its place.
Without clear priorities, organizations are left managing an ever-expanding collection of tasks. Every opportunity appears valuable. Every request appears urgent. Every initiative develops supporters. Decisions become harder because there is no shared framework for evaluating them. The organization remains busy, but busyness becomes the default response to uncertainty rather than the result of intentional choices.
I’ve noticed that some of the most effective organizations appear surprisingly calm from the outside. They are certainly working hard, but there is often less visible scrambling. Fewer urgent pivots. Fewer frantic attempts to keep every possible plate spinning at once. Initially this can create the impression that they have more resources than everyone else.
Sometimes they do.
More often, they simply have greater clarity about what matters.
That clarity shows up in subtle ways. They decline opportunities that don’t fit their priorities. They postpone projects that might be worthwhile but are not worthwhile right now. They accept that certain ideas will have to wait. They understand that choosing one direction inevitably means not choosing another. None of these decisions are particularly glamorous. In fact, they can feel disappointingly practical. Yet they create something many organizations mistake for capacity.
Focus.
The longer I work with organizations, the more I find myself paying attention to decisions rather than activities. Activities are easy to catalogue. Decisions tell a more interesting story. Why did this initiative receive attention while another did not? Why is this audience more important than that one? Why is this objective driving the work? Those questions reveal the assumptions underneath the activity, and those assumptions are often where strategy actually lives.
Perhaps that is why strategy can feel elusive. It isn’t a document sitting on a shelf. It isn’t a planning retreat or a PowerPoint presentation or a collection of aspirations arranged in a binder. Those things may support strategy, but they are not strategy itself. Strategy is the ongoing process of deciding what deserves attention and what does not. It is the discipline of choosing among competing possibilities and remaining committed to those choices long enough for them to matter.
Activity, by contrast, is much easier. Activity rewards us immediately. We can see it. We can talk about it. We can cross it off a list. Strategy often requires sitting with uncertainty a little longer and making decisions that may disappoint someone. Human beings have never been especially enthusiastic about that kind of work.
Which is understandable.
Still, whenever I hear an organization describe itself as overwhelmed, I find myself becoming curious. Not about how much work people are doing. Usually they are doing an extraordinary amount. What interests me is whether everyone shares the same understanding of what matters most. Whether priorities are genuinely clear. Whether decisions have been made that allow people to distinguish between important work and merely available work.
Those questions rarely produce immediate answers. They do, however, tend to lead to more useful conversations than discussions about whether another social media platform is required.
The irony is that strategy often feels slower in the beginning. It requires reflection, discussion, and occasionally the discomfort of making choices that not everyone will love. Yet over time it usually creates the very thing organizations are looking for: a clearer sense of direction and a more productive use of effort.
Activity has its place. Organizations need activity. Nothing gets accomplished without it.
But activity is the expression of a strategy, not a substitute for one.
The distinction is easy to overlook when everyone is busy. It becomes much harder to ignore when an organization has been running at full speed for years and can no longer explain exactly where it is going.