You bought the Ikea furniture before starting the renovation.

Over the past few years, you've probably equipped your teams. You've moved them off Excel, given them a proper task-management tool, Kanban boards, up-to-date statuses, tracking. It was a good decision. Your teams are better organized than they were five years ago.

And yet your organization isn't generating any more value for it. Strategic projects still run just as late. You're still running ten times too many in parallel. And you'd be hard-pressed to say, hand on heart, which ones actually delivered the gains promised in their business case.

There's a reason for that, and it's structural. You invested in the wrong floor. Worse: you believed that floor was the foundation, when it isn't one. You assembled the Ikea furniture before you'd even started the renovation.

1. The millions you don't see.

Let's start with the number, because it grounds the discussion. For more than ten years, the PMI has measured the share of project investment wasted through poor performance: around 10% of every euro, consistently — 9.9% in 2018, 9.4% in 2021. Nearly one euro in ten going up in smoke. On a project budget of a few tens of millions, do the math: that's millions, every year.

But that number tells only half the story. It measures the waste — the money thrown away. It doesn't measure the opportunity cost: the good projects you never launched because you were swamped by the bad ones, the market windows missed, the gains you could have secured and let slip away for lack of measuring them. That opportunity cost, invisible, is often heavier still than the visible waste.

And the classic reflex when faced with these lost millions is to equip the teams better. Except that recovers nothing at all. Because the problem was never where you put the money.

2. The pyramid everyone believes in.

There's an implicit hierarchy in the mind of most executives, a kind of Maslow's pyramid of project organization. It looks like this, from base to top.

At the bottom, what you do first, the supposedly vital layer: tasks. Getting off Excel, equipping the teams, knowing who does what.

In the middle: the budget. Staying within the envelope, tracking costs.

At the top, the luxury you allow yourself once you're a “mature” organization: the portfolio. The big picture, strategic arbitration, choosing the right projects. “We'll deal with that once we've sorted out the rest.”

The hidden message of this pyramid is devastating: you build from the bottom up, so you start with tasks, and the portfolio can wait. That's exactly the mistake that costs the millions.

Now, let's turn it upside down.

What everyone places at the top as a luxury — the portfolio — is in fact the vital need, the base on which everything rests. The real pyramid is this:

At the base, survival: are we doing the right projects? In the middle, safety: can we deliver them at the right time? At the top, fulfillment: are we securing and measuring the gains?

And the tasks? They aren't a floor. They sit outside the pyramid. They're the furniture. You bought it first, believing it was the foundations.

3. Tasks aren't the foundation. They're furniture.

Let's be clear, so there's no misunderstanding: you do need to equip your teams. A team stuck on Excel is a nightmare. Furniture is useful, sometimes essential to comfort.

But furniture holds nothing up. Arranging the furniture impeccably in a house built on the wrong plot of land won't save it. And that's precisely what most organizations do: they perfect the task execution of a portfolio they've never arbitrated.

The result has a name: executing the wrong projects perfectly. Your teams have never been so well tracked, and they push forward with exemplary discipline across thirty projects, twenty-seven of which will create no value at all. You've turned disorder into efficiency — but an efficiency serving the wrong thing.

A slightly messy team on Excel running the three right projects beats, every single time, a perfectly equipped team running thirty at random. Because value never comes from the quality of task execution. It comes from the quality of the projects you choose to execute. Executing a bad portfolio well is flooring the accelerator into a wall.

That's why starting with tasks is a trap. Not only does it create no value, it reassures you. You see your teams well organized, your boards clean, and you believe you've dealt with the issue. You've just made the wall smoother.

4. The three floors that really make the millions.

The real gains are in the three floors nobody wants to tackle first, because they're political, uncomfortable, and they force you to make hard calls.

The base: doing the right projects. This is demand management. The question isn't “is it a good idea” — almost all of them are, and that's exactly the problem. The question is “which one do we give up so the others can go ahead.” An organization that can't say no launches everything, saturates itself, and executes none of its real priorities well. That's the first seam of millions: stopping the funding of projects that should never have started.

The middle floor: capacity at the right time. A good project badly positioned in time is a dead project. A launch that slips three, six, nine months isn't just a delay: it's a market window closing, a competitor pulling ahead, market share you won't win back. Knowing, quarter by quarter, team by team, what you can actually deliver isn't logistics. It's what decides whether your good projects arrive on time or arrive too late. The second seam of millions is right there: delivering what matters at the right time.

The top: securing and measuring the gains. A business case promises millions. It's defended for months in the executive committee. Then the project launches, ships, and almost no one comes back to check, three or six months later, whether the promised gains materialized. Without that loop — measuring what you actually gained — your organization learns nothing and keeps making the same blind bets, year after year. Funding projects without ever measuring their gains is like pissing in the wind: plenty of effort, nothing to show for it. The third seam is to stop renewing what doesn't pay off and reinvest in what works.

These three floors aren't tool features. They're the three moments where an organization truly decides what it becomes. And it's them, not the furniture, that hold the millions.

5. The real skill of a leadership team.

We often think an organization's maturity is read from its tools. It isn't. It's read from its ability to build these three floors in the right order: choosing the right projects, delivering them at the right time, measuring what they return.

This is a leadership skill, not a team matter. A CEO, an executive committee, a chief of staff don't manage tasks. They decide what the organization says yes to, what it has the capacity to hold, and what it has actually gained. It's that quality, and that alone, that makes a strategy executable. A brilliant strategy laid on an upside-down pyramid never turns into results. It dissolves across thirty projects, slips six months, and no one will ever be able to say whether it worked.

So if you want to go after these millions, don't start by asking your teams to organize themselves better. Start with a far more uncomfortable question, the one at the bottom of the real pyramid: among everything we're running today, what truly deserves to exist, what do we have the capacity to deliver on time, and what will we be able to measure?

The furniture can wait. You don't fit out the kitchen of a house when you haven't yet decided whether to knock down the walls.

This article first appeared in my LinkedIn newsletter Il était une fois un CODIR, where every two weeks I share situations experienced in the leadership committee.