How governments can resist initiative overload
This research brief was published through ANZSOG's The Bridge newsletter, which connects academic research with public sector practice. It provides a concise summary of a piece of research relevant to public sector professionals.
Governments face a persistent challenge of initiative overload. As initiatives accumulate, attention becomes fragmented and delivery slows. An article in Public Money & Management argues that focus, rather than volume, is what drives delivery speed. It finds that more concentrated portfolios are associated with stronger delivery performance.
The discipline required to achieve this is a design choice that governments can build into how they work. This involves:
treating leadership attention as the binding constraint
forcing explicit trade-offs before starting new work
reframing stopping an initiative as a mark of good governance rather than failure.
A familiar pattern
Across governments, the pattern is familiar. Departments and arm’s-length bodies accumulate ever-growing portfolios of initiatives: transformation programs, pilots and task forces. Each begins with a sensible rationale. Collectively, they overload organisations, fragment attention and slow delivery.
This phenomenon is often treated as a co-ordination or resourcing problem. However, it is better understood as a systemic issue: initiative overload. It is driven by a type of cognitive bias where the number of programs in an organisation’s portfolio exceeds its capacity to govern them coherently.
The cognitive dynamics of overload
Public managers are systematically biased in ways that favour launching new initiatives and resist stopping existing ones. The following biases contribute to initiative overload:
Optimism bias leads to new initiatives being launched on best-case assumptions about capacity. Every new program competes not only for budget but for the scarce cognitive resources of public managers – a constraint that optimism bias undervalues.
Loss aversion makes stopping existing programs politically difficult. Closing an initiative feels like admitting failure, even when evidence shows diminishing returns.
The availability heuristic skews attention towards high-profile initiatives, crowding out the quiet but critical maintenance of core systems. Portfolios become dominated by politically relevant projects while foundational capabilities erode.
An institutional issue
These individual biases do not stay individual. A three-step process converts them into an organisational outcome.
The institution advantages the optimism that launches initiatives at the point of entry. Business case approval processes reward optimistic projections over realistic ones.
Biases are locked in. Accountability systems attach blame to program closure, but no penalty to the cost of overload. This turns loss aversion from an individual bias into a structural imbalance.
Biases are normalised. Because continuing is rewarded and stopping is penalised, continuation becomes the default that requires no justification.
The role of strategic subtraction
Resisting initiative overload lies in what the article terms ‘strategic subtraction’ – the discipline of doing fewer things with greater intensity. Strategic subtraction is proactive. It constrains the portfolio before overload occurs, treating focus as a design principle. It is distinct from ‘cutback management’ when organisations are under fiscal pressure.
Cutback management is a reactive response to budget constraint, in which programs are cut because money is short. Strategic subtraction is independent of fiscal pressure. A jurisdiction may practise it even when well-funded because the binding constraint it addresses is leadership attention, not money.
Portfolio management
Portfolio management can act as a brake on the system. It asks not just, “Is this initiative a good idea?”, but “Does it fit within our current capacity?” and “What are we stopping to make room for it?” The research shows that smaller, more concentrated portfolios are associated with stronger delivery performance.
Focus also creates speed by creating slack. A system running at 100 per cent has zero capacity and any disruption causes gridlock. A department operating at capacity loses three capabilities:
The ability to respond to crises without displacing existing commitments. Every emergency requires senior managers to arbitrate between the crisis and their existing portfolio, creating delays at precisely the moment speed matters most.
The ability to accelerate genuine priorities. When a new and genuinely important initiative emerges, it cannot be staffed quickly because resources are locked up in lower-priority programs.
The capacity for deep work. Teams juggling multiple initiatives incur substantial switching costs. Empirical research shows that while interrupted work may be completed faster, it does so at the cost of significantly higher stress, effort, time pressure, and cognitive workload.
When organisations maintain discipline on active initiatives, they create the organisational slack required to operate with agility. This is the central paradox – to go faster, government must do less at once.
The bottom line
Recognising initiative overload as a systemic issue is the first step. Building institutions that resist it is the second. There are four practical mechanisms organisations can use:
Treat leadership attention as a finite resource. Portfolio plans should be stress-tested against the realistic availability of senior leadership time, not just funding.
Force explicit trade-offs. Justify running a new initiative and an existing one concurrently rather than allowing it by default.
Normalise stopping. Closure must be reframed institutionally as a sign of good governance.
Measure focus. Departments should be assessed not just on what they start, but also on their ability to consolidate and finish.
Want to read more?
New development: The architecture of focus—how governments resist initiative overload – Vsevolod Shabad, Public Money & Management, August 2026