How to Prioritise What Matters: Strategic Focus for Your 2026 Transformation
- Janice George-Pinard
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
Helping you escape overwhelm and choose the right initiatives for maximum impact.
2026 is fast approaching, and with it comes the pressure to grow, evolve, and transform. Many leaders feel the urgency. They sense that their business can’t enter the new year with the same systems, structures, or strategies that carried them through 2025.
And yet, when it’s time to actually plan the transformation, they hit a familiar wall:
Too many ideas. Too many needs. Too many priorities competing for attention.
The result? Overwhelm. Confusion… A transformation plan that tries to fix everything at once and ends up achieving very little.
If you’re preparing for a major shift in 2026, learning how to prioritise the right things is not just helpful… it’s essential. Strategic focus is the difference between scattered effort and meaningful progress.
Let’s break down how to choose what truly matters.
1. Start With the Destination: What Does Success Look Like in 2026?
You can’t prioritise without clarity.
Before analysing projects or setting goals, define the future you’re working towards:
What kind of business do you want to lead next year?
What do you want to be known for?
What needs to grow? What needs to stop?
What impact do you want to make on your customers, your team, and your industry?
This vision becomes your filter. Anything that doesn’t support it, no matter how good it sounds, becomes a distraction.
Remember vision shows you the difference between a good thing and the right thing.
2. Assess Where You Are Now (With Brutal Honesty)
Transformation begins with truth.
You must understand your current reality before deciding what to change. Look at:
Operations
Systems and technology
Team capability
Culture and behaviours
Customer experience
Financial health
Learning and growth
Your gaps are not weaknesses. They are instructions, telling you exactly where to focus your time, energy, and investment. Without this assessment, you risk prioritising symptoms instead of root causes.
3. Choose 1–3 Strategic Priorities — Not 10
This is where most leaders go wrong. They build long lists, ambitious plans, and complicated roadmaps. But transformation collapses under the weight of too many competing initiatives.
Instead, choose:
1–3 core priorities that will have the greatest impact (When it comes to strategic priorities, I personally prefer 3.
2–3 supporting projects that help deliver those priorities
Everything else becomes “later, not now.”
Focus is not about doing less. It’s about doing what matters most.
4. Focus on High-Leverage Areas
Not all initiatives carry equal weight. High-leverage initiatives are those that create ripple effects across the business, such as:
Strengthening leadership capability
Improving cultural alignment
Upgrading core systems
Fixing broken processes
Enhancing customer experience
Building stronger performance management
Improving data insights for better decisions
These areas might feel “big,” but they unlock improvement everywhere else.
Pick initiatives that will change the engine… not just do the paintwork.
5. Identify What You Will Stop Doing
Strategic focus is as much about subtraction as addition.
Ask:
What are we doing that no longer serves our future?
What activities drain time but add no value?
What legacy processes or commitments need to end?
Eliminating noise creates space for real transformation.
6. Involve Your Team in the Prioritisation Process
You may have heard this saying - ‘Leaders see the vision. Teams see the reality.’ This cannot be overstated.
When you involve your team:
You gain insights you may have missed
You secure early buy-in
You reduce resistance to change
You strengthen alignment
When you get your team involved, transformation becomes something you build with people, rather than do to people.
7. Use Data to Support Decisions…Not Guesswork
Data reduces emotional decision-making and gives clarity to what truly needs attention.
Track:
Performance metrics
Customer satisfaction
Operational bottlenecks
Team capacity and capability
Financial patterns
Trends and forecasts
The right data helps you prioritise what is urgent, important, and strategically aligned.
8. Build a 2026 Roadmap and Stick to It
Once priorities are chosen, create a simple, structured plan:
What must happen?
When will it happen?
Who owns it?
How will progress be measured?
This roadmap keeps your efforts focused and prevents the temptation to chase shiny new ideas.
Focus Drives Transformation
Your success in 2026 will not be determined by how much you try to change. It will be determined by how intentionally you choose what actually matters.
Prioritise your:
Vision
Gaps
High-leverage initiatives
Team capability
Culture
Systems
Data
Implementation plan
With clarity and focus, your transformation becomes not just possible, but powerful.
To find out more about Strategic Priorities, take a look at this blog post Setting Strategic Priorities: Choosing What Matters Most
If you’d like support building your 2026 transformation priorities and roadmap, I can help you create clarity, structure, and momentum.
Send me a message or book a call. Let’s design your 2026 transformation with intention, not overwhelm.
The above article is part of the Make Growth Happen Series, which is tailored to empower business owners like you to develop the right strategy, structure and skills needed to take your business to the next level.
Janice is a Certified Business Coach whose extensive knowledge and experience in various aspects of business have set her on a mission to help business leaders turn their Vision into Reality. She works with them to develop the right strategies, structure, and skills needed to take their business to the next level. She is the Author of The Ten Commandments of Crisis Management. Janice also works with Christian business owners who desire to run their businesses based on Biblical Principles.
For full bio and coaching inquiries, go to http://www.way2betterbusiness.com