In most companies, two artifacts are produced every year and never collide. The strategy lives in a leadership deck. The headcount plan lives in a finance spreadsheet. Neither one references the other, and the gap between them is where the year goes to die.
A strategic priority without a named percentage of named people's weeks is not a priority. It is an aspiration.
The collision nobody runs
The exercise is not hard. List the strategic priorities. For each one, list the people whose time it requires and what fraction of their week it consumes. Sum the fractions per person. Compare to 100%.
In practice, this exercise nearly always produces totals north of 130%. Sometimes north of 200%. The leadership team has committed the same engineering team to four priorities and the same RevOps lead to six. The arithmetic was never run. The arithmetic was the strategy.
If your priorities sum to more capacity than you have, the team will quietly choose which ones happen. They will not choose the ones you would have chosen.
Why finance can't fix it
Finance owns the headcount table but doesn't own the priorities. Strategy owns the priorities but doesn't open the headcount table. The capacity-versus-priority reconciliation has no natural owner, so it doesn't happen — and the team absorbs the overcommit by doing a little of everything badly.
The fix is not more headcount. It's putting capacity in the same room as strategy, in the same artifact, at the same time.
The three numbers that make a priority real
For every strategic priority, write down:
- Bandwidth. Named people, named percentage of their week.
- Budget. Named euros, with a category.
- Calendar. First and last day this priority occupies that bandwidth.
If you cannot fill in all three, the priority is not a priority yet. It is a candidate.
The Vindaris view
An execution layer that doesn't include capacity is a wish-list visualizer. The system has to make it impossible to add a new bet without showing whose week it consumes, what it costs, and which existing bet gives way. Strategy that doesn't reconcile against capacity is the politest form of self-deception.