Good thing you don't run your EBIT the way you run your annual planning.

You know your EBIT target down to the decimal. Your budget is signed off by the board, audited, challenged, checked to the last euro. When it comes to the numbers, your rigor is surgical.

And yet the one question that determines whether that budget actually materializes — “can my teams deliver what I've just funded?” — you've never asked with a tenth of that rigor.

Once a year, on the strength of a few well-crafted slides, you commit tens of millions for twelve firm months (and yes: the time your teams spend on these projects is money too).

Of course, you then get quarterly reports. But they're crude: projects in green, amber, red, a completion percentage, a capex line. Enough to know things are stalling. Not enough to see the wall coming. And above all, never tied to their real financial consequence.

Because a project that slips isn't just late. Here's what it really means: to finish it, you'll overspend. And a share of your portfolio — often 30 to 40% — spills over into the next fiscal year. In other words, next year's budget isn't free: it's already mortgaged by the projects you failed to finish this year. You think you're allocating. In reality, you're repaying.

People call this “being on budget.” I call it the hypocrisy of “on budget” without “on scope”: we celebrate the envelope held, forgetting we only held it by quietly dropping half of what we'd promised to deliver.

This isn't a money problem. Nor a competence problem with your teams. It's a problem of granularity and visibility. You're funding a capacity you've never measured, and that's precisely where part of your money goes.

The good news: the fix isn't some convoluted machine. It's a simple, effective system.

Let's look at what really happens in a budget trade-off. Every department defends its budget line. Every sponsor swears their project is “critical.” And in the end, it isn't the most deliverable project that wins, it's the best-defended one. You arbitrate on conviction (that part's fine) but with no check on capacity (and that part's not fine)

The problem is that there's a law the annual budget blithely ignores: you'll always have more ideas than capacity to execute them. This isn't a motivation issue, it's organizational physics. A truck rated for ten tons doesn't carry twenty just because someone typed “twenty” into a file. It breaks.

The annual budget, meanwhile, writes “twenty.” It says yes to too many projects because the annual granularity dilutes the conflict: over twelve months, everything seems to fit. The overload only becomes visible the moment it blows up.

And it costs. For more than ten years, the PMI has measured the share of investment wasted due to poor project performance: missed deadlines, blown budgets, scope creep. The figure hovers around 10% of every euro invested, with remarkable stability: 9.9% in 2018, 9.4% in 2021, after a peak of 13.5% a decade earlier. Nearly one euro in ten. And roughly one project in three fails to meet its objectives. PMI + 2

That 10% isn't some abstract inevitability. It's largely the cost of the overload you're funding without seeing it.

A caveat: this isn't about killing your annual vision. Your twelve- to eighteen-month roadmap still holds. The major milestones, the direction, the promise to the board — none of that changes. What changes is the granularity at which you commit capacity.

Why the quarter? Because it's the only time frame where you can honestly say: “that team can deliver this in the next 90 days.” On a yearly scale, “it fits / it doesn't fit” means nothing. An annual average hides everything: your finance team is maxed out in Q4 on the close, so nothing moves then, whatever the stated priority. The detail is invisible over twelve months; it's obvious over a quarter.

The year then becomes a succession of quarters. Each quarter, you commit the next batch. If something unexpected comes up, you re-arbitrate the following quarter, instead of letting things drift for six months in silence and counting the bodies in December.

Direction without certainty is just promises. Certainty without direction is just tinkering. The two together are an organization that delivers. The vision says where you're going. The quarter says what you can actually deliver with the teams you have.

This is the thing I'm talking about. A single page. Quarter by quarter, team by team, you see the real workload. You add a project: a team turns red. You remove one, you push another to the next quarter: the overload dissolves before your eyes.

You arrange the big rocks and the small rocks. You move them around. You watch what holds. It's tactile, visual, immediate. Not a theoretical projection: a simulation you manipulate live, in the meeting, in front of your exec committee.

That's the CEO's cockpit. Not forty slides. One page everyone reads the same way, where the trade-off is finally visible to all at once. The power isn't in the complexity, it's in the simplicity. A simple, imperfect process adopted by the whole organization is infinitely better than a perfect one nobody keeps up.

The day a CEO sees this page for the first time, they almost always ask the same question: “why has no one ever shown me this before?”

“It's heavy to set up.” It's exactly the opposite.

The objection always shows up here: to get this page, you have to break each project into quarterly deliverables by team, estimate the workload, keep a database up to date. It sounds enormous.

Let's flip it. The real weight isn't the capacity structure. The real weight is the mess you live in today. Half-scoped projects. Formats that don't talk to each other. An Excel here, a slide there, a tool no one updates. The heterogeneity. The chaos.

And here's what no one ever tells CEOs: this chaos is precisely what's stopping you today from getting a single euro out of artificial intelligence. AI doesn't work on chaos. It works on structure. A heterogeneous, unscoped organization is illegible — for your exec committee and for a machine alike.

Building a clean capacity base, then, isn't a chore that comes before the value. It is the value. It's the act that makes your organization legible — to your teams and to AI. You're not “doing governance”: you're opening up gains that were mechanically closed to you.

And this is where the loop closes. Scoping a project, breaking it into coherent chunks, estimating the workload by skill: all of that used to take days, and so was never done for the long tail of a hundred small projects that quietly eat away at your teams. AI now does it in a few minutes. The structure that was too costly to maintain by hand becomes cheap. AI builds the base; the base multiplies AI. And the more it learns from your teams, the more accurate its estimates.

This isn't a convoluted machine. It's the opposite of one: it's what finally tidies up the factory. In practice, it takes neither an army nor an eighteen-month project. A chief of staff at two days a week, equipped with the right tool, is enough to set it up and keep it running quarter after quarter.

What your 10% is worth.

Let's come back to your one euro in ten. This isn't a consulting-firm statistic. It's the overload you keep funding because you can't see it. It's the projects that slip until June. It's the teams running at 180% that deliver nothing on time — not out of incompetence, but because they were asked to carry twenty tons.

With the page, you stop funding the overload. You no longer arbitrate budget lines, you arbitrate scenarios: “if we keep these ten projects and push these twenty-four, here's what actually ships.” You commit to what's deliverable, not to what's well-pitched. And the carryover that was mortgaging next year dissolves, because you stop promising what doesn't fit.

You also recover something you'd lost without ever putting words to it: trust in your own governance. You stop feeling like you're being led around, because you finally see the same reality as your teams, at the same moment.

The annual budget will always tell you how much. Only the capacity page tells you whether. And the real question for a CEO isn't “how much do I put in,” it's “what actually gets through.”

So the next time someone presents you an annual budget, ask a single question: show me the capacity, quarter by quarter, team by team. The silence that follows will tell you everything you need to know.

For the demo, it's here --> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7469674283959472129/

This article first appeared in my LinkedIn newsletter Il était une fois un CODIR, where every two weeks I recount real situations lived out in the executive committee.