Summoning the Courage to Focus - by Sam Gerstenzang

Focus isn't about eliminating bad ideas - anyone can do that. The hard part is rejecting the other good ideas that don't fit your strategy. Real strategy means creating an internally consistent set of priorities that build on each other without detours. But when a new great idea shows up, most teams add it to the list instead of saying no.

The failure to focus stems from two opposite problems with confidence. When you're too confident, everything seems easy and doable, so you try to do it all. You don't realize that every idea contains its own universe of good ideas that also need prioritization. On the flip side, when you're uncertain what will work, you hedge - spreading resources across many possibilities hoping a few will succeed. Both paths destroy focus.

The solution is getting closer to reality and developing appropriate confidence levels. For things that seem easy, interrogate what might make them hard. What happens if first- or second-order effects go wrong? What assumptions are you making about who does the work and how? A few hours of skeptical thinking and customer conversations can surface hidden complexity. When you're hedging because nothing feels certain, your job is to create certainty faster. Lay out expanding sets of hypotheses that build on each other, then race to get enough information to move to the next layer and ask the next question.

This sounds simpler than it is because the fear of being wrong paralyzes you. A clear, focused but wrong strategy might make you look like a fool in hindsight. That fear makes you tack on one more thing to the priority list - we can just do that extra thing too, right? The answer has to be no. You have the tools to do anything, but not everything. Sometimes though, the rules flip - when winning requires shipping multiple things, you have to figure out how to expand bandwidth rather than narrow focus.