CIO priorities under pressure: Why strategic stopping creates space to grow

The CIO’s priority paradox: infinite expectations, finite capacity 

If you’re a CIO, you’re likely carrying one of the heaviest loads in the C-suite. Your transformation agenda isn’t just big, it’s sprawling. AI adoption, data modernisation, product-led delivery, cyber resilience, workforce transformation – every strategic priority has a digital dependency, and most of them land squarely in technology. It’s no surprise that fatigue is rising.

Our Transformation Index shows that 69% of CIOs say employees are exhausted by continual change, and 73% cite competing demands on their time. Across the wider C-suite, 63% see the same pattern – constant transformation has stretched organisations to their limits. And only 33% of CIOs say their transformation goals are met smoothly.

Your ambition isn’t the issue, it’s the sheer volume of change competing for your attention. CIOs are expected to deliver everything, often at all the same time. But when you try to do everything, you dilute the impact of what matters most.

So, where do you focus when everything feels urgent? How do you protect your team’s energy without slowing momentum?

This is where a new leadership muscle is emerging – one that distinguishes the CIOs who thrive from those who grind forward on empty.

Strategic stopping: The discipline of pausing, pivoting or retiring work to protect focus, energy and momentum – anchored in clear prioritisation (e.g., MoSCoW) and explicit stop/go points.

When everything is a priority for the CIO, then nothing is

Transformation is struggling not because leaders lack ideas, but because they have too many. Our Transformation Index shows that leaders aren’t rallying around a single focus, instead, almost every priority sits tightly between 19% and 24%. The result is predictable, no clear North Star, no real sequencing and no room for teams to breathe. CIOs feel this tension acutely.

44% view transformation as tactical rather than strategic, not because they lack strategic vision, but because they’re trying to deliver too much at the same time. Add the C-suite perception gap (where CEOs often overestimate progress compared to their C-suite peers), and the overload deepens.

You’re not imagining the overload. Capacity is genuinely stretched, and the impact is real:

• 83% of CIOs struggle to regain direction when momentum fades
• 75% struggle to shift behaviours while maintaining psychological safety
• Across organisations, 63% face cultural blockers and 66% struggle with upskilling
• More than half cite too many competing demands as a barrier to change

Overload isn’t just an operational issue, it’s a cultural one. It drains energy, erodes trust and creates an environment where people constantly feel “behind”, no matter how hard they work. In short – transformation slows not because leaders resist change, but because there is simply too much change to absorb.

Why doing less helps you achieve more

So what’s the answer? The data makes this clear: 81% of leading organisations, who focus on strategically deprioritising projects, report their transformations meet goals smoothly, compared to just 3% of laggards.

1. You’ll create space in a world of competing demands. When CIOs face a long list of top priorities, the only way to create capacity is to reduce the load. Stopping removes the noise so teams can focus on meaningful change, not just more change.
2. You’ll regain direction when things drift. With dozens of initiatives moving at different speeds, momentum inevitably stalls. Stopping gives CIOs the opportunity to reset, re-anchor and provide the organisation with a clear path forward.
3. You’ll stabilise behaviour change. Shifting to product-led delivery or embedding AI into workflows takes time and repetition, and 75% of CIOs say it’s difficult to drive behavioural change while protecting psychological safety. Stopping creates the breathing space required to learn, embed and perform.
4. You’ll support workforce transformation. CIOs know the skills challenge is urgent – 40% cite strategic workforce planning as a top concern, and 85% expect AI to disrupt roles and responsibilities. But employees can’t upskill when they’re overwhelmed. Stopping frees the time and cognitive bandwidth needed for learning, experimentation and capability building.
5. You’ll lift yourself out of tactical mode. CIOs are often forced into firefighting because their portfolios are simply too large. Strategic stopping shifts the focus back to long-term value, rather than short-term velocity. It’s a mark of strategic maturity, not retreat.

Strategic stopping isn’t a buzzword, it’s how you can make space for the work that really matters.

Embedding strategic stopping into your operating model as a CIO

Stopping is a mindset, but it’s also a practice. It’s a repeatable capability you can build into how you govern and deliver change. But how?

1. Start with value, not volume

Start by mapping every initiative to your value outcomes to quickly reveal any low-value or duplicative efforts. If it doesn’t link to value, it’s a project to pause.

2. Create pause points in governance

Build stop/go moments into your delivery cycles. Make it easy – and psychologically safe – for your teams to recommend pausing or retiring work. Celebrate early exits that free capacity for higher-value efforts. Let data guide these decisions, such as fatigue signals, engagement levels and workload distribution. Prioritisation only becomes real when it shows up in governance, this is where MoSCoWstyle criteria and timeboxed checkpoints earn their keep

Many CIOs tell us that how you stop matters as much as what you stop. As Ketan Patel, Group CIO at OCS, puts it: “Strategic stopping should follow the principles of MoSCoW to set the agenda and build the right checkpoints. Too often, long projects fail to capture everchanging business and environmental movements. Strategic stopping enables the repivoting of objectives and deliverables.”

3. Think of capacity as currency – and spend it wisely

Bandwidth isn’t infinite. Leading organisations know this – 99% monitor employee engagement during transformation (vs 54% of laggards). Track real signals like fatigue and engagement to decide when to slow down or stop.

4. Reframe stopping as a leadership strength

Always communicate and tell the story about why work’s pausing. Explain what it unlocks and why it matters. Show how stopping speeds up learning, AI experimentation and product-led ways of working. The message to your teams then becomes simple, “We stop the things that don’t serve us, so we can double down on the things that do.”

5. Invest in adaptability

Stopping works best when systems and people can pivot. That means building skills for change, promoting cross-functional collaboration and creating modular technology architectures that make course correcting easier, not harder.

A practical CIO toolkit you can use tomorrow

A. 30/60/90 day programme for stopping

• Day 1–30: Run a portfolio “value and load” scan. Map initiatives to value outcomes, measure team load and context switching. Flag quick win pauses.
• Day 31–60: Introduce stop/go checkpoints, pilot “early exit” celebrations, publish your value compass and decision criteria.
• Day 61–90: Scale pause points to all change forums, retire or re-sequence 10–20% of low value work.

B. A simple prioritisation scorecard (score 1–5; stop ≤12)

If your teams use MoSCoW today, map it to this scorecard so stopping decisions are consistent across portfolios.

• Value to customer / employee / business
• Strategic alignment (value compass)
• Capacity impact (people bandwidth, change load)
• Risk and reversibility (cost of delay, safety, regulatory)
• Evidence and momentum (data signals, adoption, engagement)

The CIO priority lens: where do you focus next?

We’re entering a new era of transformation – one defined by adaptability, not activity.

You just need to start somewhere and look at what to stop, so you can focus on the work that really matters. Strategically stopping is how you’ll protect your people, focus their energy and make progress on the work that creates real value.  

So here’s your challenge… 

What will you stop as you go into 2026, to make space for what really drives value?