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What should a CEO stop doing during a company turnaround?

During a turnaround, stop initiatives that cannot justify their next demand on the people and decisions required for recovery. Review the work against the recovery mandate, current obligations, and available capacity. Close or pause work deliberately, with an owner for the consequences, rather than allowing priorities to disappear through neglect.

Organizational attention is the pattern through which a company’s arrangements direct decision makers toward particular issues and possible responses. This working definition follows William Ocasio’s 1997 attention-based view of the firm. Applied here, it treats meeting time and required decisions as part of the demand an initiative places on the organization.

A stop list differs from a priority ranking. Ranking says which initiative matters more. A stop list says which work will no longer make a claim on capacity, who owns the closure, and what must happen before the work could resume.

Begin with the recovery mandate

Write the recovery mandate in operating terms before reviewing projects. Specify the problem to resolve and the obligations that must be maintained during the recovery. Use the mandate agreed with the appropriate governance body, rather than inventing a new one in the workshop.

A hypothetical mandate might prioritize restoring reliable delivery while maintaining required service commitments. An initiative that supports a distant market opportunity may still have value. The current decision is whether that value justifies its next use of the same people needed for recovery.

Avoid reducing the mandate to a vague appeal for focus. Participants need to understand which trade-offs leadership has authorized. Where financial or contractual assumptions remain unverified, assign the verification instead of treating an estimate as a decision rule.

The returning founder’s turnaround playbook addresses mandate and reentry. The stop-list workshop converts that mandate into explicit decisions about ongoing work.

Inventory the demand behind each initiative

Ask every sponsor to describe the next meaningful commitment their initiative requires. Include management reviews, decisions, customer involvement, and dependencies on specialist staff. A project can have little new expenditure and still consume scarce leadership capacity.

Use current work records. Ask which requests were made during the last operating cycle and which requests are already committed for the next one. Separate recorded demand from the sponsor’s forecast.

Identify the person who becomes the bottleneck if several initiatives proceed together. Then ask that person to verify the picture. Do not assume that two projects use different capacity because they sit in different departments.

Capture maintenance work as well as named projects. A reporting requirement that no decision maker uses is still work. Check whether it serves a regulatory, contractual, or governance purpose before proposing to remove it.

Run the recovery stop-list workshop

The recovery stop-list workshop is an advisory method proposed here, not a validated psychological intervention. Its output is a set of authorized work decisions and the transition tasks needed to make them real.

  1. State the decision boundary. Identify who can stop work and which obligations require review by finance, counsel, or the board. Do not offer the workshop authority it does not possess.
  2. List the next capacity claim. For each initiative, record its next decision, delivery task, and required specialist involvement. Use a consistent operating period chosen for your recovery situation.
  3. Connect the claim to the mandate. Ask which recovery outcome or necessary obligation the work supports. Require an explanation that can be examined, not a general statement about strategic importance.
  4. Test the consequence of stopping. Identify the customer, employee, supplier, or operating dependency affected. Separate a verified consequence from a feared reputational reaction.
  5. Choose continue, pause, or close. State the next authorized action and its limit. A pause needs a review condition; closure needs an end to future requests.
  6. Assign transition ownership. Name who will notify affected parties, preserve needed records, and remove recurring demands. Check that closure work has capacity too.
  7. Inspect the capacity released. At the next operating review, verify which meetings, requests, and tasks ended. Redirect the released capacity explicitly rather than assuming it will reach the recovery work.

Record exceptions alongside the decision. If an obligation prevents immediate closure, identify the work necessary to satisfy it and distinguish that work from continuing the entire initiative.

Use a script that makes stopping legitimate

Sponsors may reasonably expect a case for closure. They also need a way to raise a consequence the room has missed. Use language that recognizes both needs without protecting every initiative indefinitely.

“We are deciding what the recovery can support now. A proposal can be useful and still lose its place in this period. Show the consequence of stopping it, the evidence behind that consequence, and the smallest obligation we must preserve.”

Then apply the standard to your own initiatives. If founder-sponsored work is excluded from the exercise, explain the governing reason and include its capacity claim in the total. An unexplained exemption undermines the workshop’s operating logic.

Avoid describing closure as a judgment on the sponsor’s worth. The purpose is to choose future commitments. Where the evidence indicates a performance issue, address that through the appropriate separate process and seek employment counsel when necessary.

A composite scene: everything is still important

Consider a hypothetical composite. You leave a recovery meeting with a shorter priority slide. That evening, you answer messages during a family celebration because the same product launch, reporting redesign, and supplier review still require your approval.

Nobody has stopped the work. Each sponsor interprets the new slide as an instruction to work harder while preserving the original commitments. Your calendar remains the place where the contradiction becomes visible.

At a stop-list workshop, the team maps the next demands. The reporting redesign and the delivery recovery both need the same systems specialist. The redesign has a contractual reporting dependency, but the proposed visual overhaul does not support that obligation.

The team preserves the necessary reporting work and closes the visual overhaul for the recovery period. A named owner removes the design reviews and tells the requesting teams what has changed. The specialist’s newly available time is assigned to the delivery dependency.

This constructed example does not show that reporting redesigns are usually expendable. It shows why stopping a defined part of the work can be more precise than canceling a whole category or issuing another ranking.

Avoid decisions based only on past investment

Staw’s 1976 escalation-of-commitment experiment examined how responsibility and unfavorable consequences affected further investment in a simulated decision. Use the concept as a caution about reasoning, not an accusation against a sponsor.

Ask what justifies the next commitment from today’s position. Previous work may have produced assets that make continuation attractive. Verify those assets and the remaining work. The amount already spent is not, by itself, a reason to approve more.

Give the sponsor an opportunity to state the forward case without defending the original decision. You can acknowledge that an earlier choice was reasonable while deciding that current conditions support closure.

The opportunity-cost priority review can help make the displaced work visible. Compare feasible alternatives that draw on the same capacity, rather than comparing one fully described project with an imaginary free alternative.

Make a pause different from indefinite continuation

A pause should state what remains active. Does the company continue paying for a service? Does anyone maintain a customer relationship? Which records must be retained? Ask the responsible functions to confirm the details.

Specify the condition for reconsideration. That condition might be a verified operating milestone or new evidence about demand. A calendar reminder can prompt the review, but the arrival of the reminder does not establish that the initiative deserves to restart.

If the organization keeps discussing a paused initiative at every meeting, examine whether the pause released attention. Remove routine agenda items unless a defined condition requires them. Preserve a clear route for reporting a new obligation or material risk.

For a closed initiative, say who can authorize a new proposal. Otherwise, fragments of the project may return as unrelated small requests that recreate its total demand.

Do not demand implementation without capacity

Weiner’s 2009 readiness theory separates shared commitment from shared beliefs about implementation capability. It also distinguishes readiness from the resources that help shape those beliefs. The theory was developed for organizational change, with healthcare examples.

Your advisory application is concrete: verify what the recovery team can perform after the stop decisions. A team may accept the mandate while correctly observing that the remaining work still exceeds its capacity.

Use the pace-and-capacity review before announcing a timetable. If capacity remains insufficient, decide which additional work ends, which resource becomes available, or which milestone changes. Do not convert the arithmetic into a question of employee commitment.

Reset inherited promises through an authorized communication process. Quietly allowing an old promise to fail is different from closing the work and addressing the obligation it created.

Before the workshop closes, ask each receiving owner to confirm the revised scope in their own words. Resolve differences while the decision makers are present. A common label can conceal different assumptions about which tasks will end.

Verify that stopping changed the work

At the review, inspect the calendar and the request queue. Ask affected owners what they no longer do. Check whether customers or adjacent teams experienced a consequence that the workshop failed to anticipate.

If released capacity never reached the recovery work, trace where it went before concluding the stop decision failed. A new emergency or an unrecorded executive request may have displaced it. Put that demand into the next review.

Keep the resulting list concise: work stopped, obligations protected, owner accountable for closure, and condition for reconsideration. The useful outcome is fewer competing claims on the people needed for recovery, with the consequences handled openly.

Before confirming a stop decision, walk through the next obligation the initiative would otherwise serve. Name who receives the closure instruction and who handles an exception. If a contractual or operational dependency remains, assign that work rather than assuming the stop list removes it. A workstream leaves the active portfolio only when its continuing obligations have an authorized owner and the released capacity can be used as planned.

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