Across government, the pattern is familiar. Departments and arm’s-length bodies accumulate ever-growing portfolios of initiatives: transformation programmes, pilots, reviews, taskforces. Each begins with a sensible rationale. Collectively, they overload organisations, fragment attention, and slow delivery.
This is often treated as a coordination or resourcing problem. In practice, it is better understood as a predictable cognitive failure in large organisations – one that becomes more damaging as the world around them becomes more dynamic.
A lesson learned through failure
In the 1970s, Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month, a post-mortem on a large software development programme he had led but badly underestimated its complexity. The project consumed thousands of person-years and still struggled to deliver. Brooks’ authority came not from theory but from the lived experience of failure. His core insight was uncomfortable: beyond a certain point, adding more people and more parallel work makes complex systems slower and less predictable.
Government today continues to relearn the same lesson, not in software teams but in policy and delivery portfolios.
The cognitive mechanics of initiative overload
Initiative overload persists not because leaders are irrational, but because they are systematically biased in predictable ways.
Optimism bias leads to new initiatives being launched on best-case assumptions about capacity and alignment, while existing commitments are quietly assumed to absorb no additional cost.
Loss aversion makes stopping programmes disproportionately difficult. Closing or consolidating initiatives feels like admitting failure, even when evidence suggests diminishing returns. Starting something new, by contrast, signals action and responsiveness.
Salience bias skews attention towards high-profile initiatives with visible sponsorship, crowding out less visible but operationally critical work. Leaders respond to what shouts loudest, not to what creates the greatest cumulative risk.
Fragmented accountability completes the picture. Each initiative may appear reasonable in isolation. The collective burden only becomes visible when delivery starts to degrade – often too late to respond cleanly.
These biases do not operate in isolation. Optimism launches the initiative. Loss aversion prevents review. Salience redirects leadership attention to the next crisis. Fragmented accountability ensures no one owns the cumulative burden. The result is not four separate errors but a self-reinforcing cycle that only breaks when delivery visibly degrades.
None of this reflects individual weakness. These biases are amplified by organisational structures that reward activity, expansion, and signalling far more than consolidation.
Why consolidation feels harder than it should
From the outside, the remedy appears obvious: do fewer things. Inside government, this is deceptively hard.
Initiatives quickly acquire governance boards, reporting cycles, and stakeholders. These structures are designed to demonstrate progress, not to question ongoing relevance. Over time, assumptions made at launch harden into defaults. Asking whether an initiative should continue becomes politically and organisationally awkward.
The result is a ratchet effect. Portfolios expand easily but contract rarely. Senior attention is spread thinly. Delivery teams juggle overlapping demands. Warning signs are noticed but not acted on because there is no spare capacity to interrogate them properly.
Public inquiries repeatedly describe this pattern — across major programmes in health, infrastructure, and digital transformation. For example, inquiries into pandemic preparedness and large NHS transformation efforts, major national infrastructure projects, and early phases of digital reform have all shown the same dynamic: risks were visible and warnings existed, but portfolio overload and fragmented accountability made it hard to pause, simplify, or reset in time.
Focus as a source of speed, not constraint
There is an additional, often overlooked cost to initiative overload: it makes organisations slower to respond to change.
When portfolios are saturated, even small new initiatives require prolonged business-case development, multiple board approvals, and careful negotiation over scarce resources. The system becomes brittle. By the time something is approved, the context that justified it may already have shifted.
By contrast, disciplined limits on the number of active initiatives create slack. With fewer programmes competing for attention, organisations can start new work faster, often within existing delegated authority. Leaders spend less time arbitrating between projects and more time responding to emerging risks and opportunities.
In a world of accelerating technological, economic, and geopolitical change, this matters. Agility is not achieved by launching more initiatives, but by maintaining the capacity to act when it genuinely counts.
What leaders can do differently
Addressing initiative overload is less about new prioritisation frameworks and more about counteracting predictable cognitive traps.
Treat leadership attention as a finite resource. Plans should be stress-tested against realistic assumptions about senior time and organisational focus, not just budget and headcount. A useful discipline: if a portfolio cannot be meaningfully reviewed in a single board session, it is almost certainly too large.
Force explicit trade-offs. New initiatives should be assessed in terms of what they displace. If nothing is being stopped, the portfolio is almost certainly growing beyond control.
Normalise stopping. Sunset clauses and formal review points reframe closure as good governance rather than failure.
Separate advocacy from challenge. Where the same forums sponsor and assure initiatives, cognitive bias goes untested. Independent portfolio-level scrutiny helps surface cumulative risk.
Reward consolidation. Leaders who simplify, merge, or close programmes should be visibly supported. Without this, rational behaviour remains individually risky.
Non-executive directors and independent advisers have a particular role: to ask the uncomfortable question – 'how many initiatives can this organisation genuinely sustain?' – before performance starts to degrade, not after.
A leadership discipline for a dynamic world
Initiative overload is not a technical delivery problem. It is a leadership challenge shaped by human cognition, organisational incentives, and political signalling.
Brooks’s lesson still holds. Complexity cannot be beaten by volume of effort. In government, as in large technology programmes, the discipline to stop, consolidate, and focus is often what enables organisations to move faster, not slower.
In an era of constrained resources and rapid change, the most important leadership question may not be what else we should start, but what we should stop – and who has the authority to make that call – so that we are ready for what comes next.
Vsevolod Shabad researches and advises on cognitive bias, governance failures, and decision-making in complex organisations. His work is informed by experience in cybersecurity governance across multiple sectors and geographies, where repeated large-scale incidents have shown that technical failures are often symptoms of deeper leadership and board-level weaknesses. He focuses on how organisations can reduce systemic risk by restoring focus.