Your Growth Strategy Has More Initiatives. That Doesn’t Mean It Has More Momentum.

A business can have a capable team, ambitious leadership, strong ideas, and a long list of strategic initiatives—and still feel like something isn’t moving.

The instinctive response is often to add more: hire someone, launch another campaign, invest in technology, enter a new market.

For Shamane Tan, Founder and Chief Growth Strategist at AMBA, the more important question is what is actually preventing momentum in the first place.

Tan has spent more than a decade working with boards, C-suite leaders, and high-growth organisations across Asia-Pacific, drawing on insights from more than 200 C-suite executives worldwide. A TEDx and global keynote speaker and bestselling author of three books spanning leadership, cybersecurity, and executive decision-making, she now works with founders and leadership teams through AMBA to identify what she calls their “One Move”—the highest-leverage action capable of unlocking what comes next.

In this piece, she explains why capable organisations can work hard without gaining traction, when previous success can become a constraint, and why progress sometimes comes from doing less rather than more.

What If the Problem Isn’t Where You’re Spending the Money?

Q: AMBA is built around helping leadership teams identify their “highest-leverage move.” In your experience, what are the most common areas where businesses invest significant time and resources but see surprisingly little progress?

A: One pattern I often see is capable organisations doing a lot of good work but spreading their energy across too many things at once.

They may invest in marketing, technology, hiring, new programmes, or expansion. Any of those could be the right move. The question is whether they are addressing what is actually holding the business back.

A company might think it needs more leads when it really needs sharper positioning. Another might have strong visibility but struggle to turn that attention into trust or opportunity. Another may have a great proposition but not be reaching the people or markets where it can gain traction.

That thinking sits at the heart of AMBA. We help leadership teams identify where momentum is getting stuck, what matters most now, and the One Move that could unlock the next stage of growth.

I often use the metaphor of an ember. An ember is not a dead fire. There is already energy there. Sometimes it simply needs the right spark, in the right place, to burn brighter.

The One Move is not about pretending there is a magical answer to every business problem. It is about asking: Out of everything we could be doing, what deserves our attention most right now?

Sometimes that is a major strategic shift. Sometimes it is surprisingly small.

Why Does “Doing More” Feel Like the Safest Answer?

Q: Many organisations respond to slowing growth by launching new initiatives, hiring more people, or investing in new technology. Why do you think the real bottleneck is often somewhere else?

A: New people, technology, and initiatives can absolutely unlock growth. But they are most useful when we are clear about the problem we are asking them to solve.

When growth slows, adding something feels tangible. A new hire, a new platform, or a new campaign creates visible action.

But before adding more, I think it is worth asking: Where is the friction actually happening?

Are customers not interested? Are they interested but not converting? Has their behaviour changed? Is the proposition unclear? Are opportunities being generated but not followed through? Or is the organisation simply trying to pursue too many priorities at once?

Those are very different problems, and they call for very different responses.

Sometimes more investment is exactly what is needed. But first, we need to understand the problem before accelerating the response.

Instead of only asking, “What else should we do?”, I like asking: “What actually needs to move?”

When Does Past Success Become the Problem?

Q: Having worked with founders, boards, and more than 200 C-suite executives, are there recurring patterns that help you quickly distinguish between a business that’s facing a genuine market challenge and one that’s simply focused on the wrong problem?

A: I would be cautious about assuming you can tell immediately. Businesses, markets, and leadership contexts are too different for a universal formula.

What I have found useful is testing the story the organisation is telling itself against what is actually happening around it.

If a leadership team says, “The market is difficult,” what does that mean?

Have customer priorities changed? Are competitors seeing the same thing? Are customers spending less, or spending differently? Are conversations still happening but not converting?

And I think there is another question organisations sometimes need to ask themselves:

Have we continued to evolve too?

Something that worked brilliantly five years ago may still be valuable, but it may not work in exactly the same way today.

Markets change. Technology changes. Customer expectations change. Even the way people discover businesses, evaluate expertise, and decide whom to trust has changed.

Previous success gives us valuable experience. But if it becomes a fixed playbook, it can also make new possibilities harder to see.

Sometimes the challenge really is the market. At other times, the opportunity may still exist, but the way we are approaching it needs to evolve.

So one question I like is:

“Has the market moved, and have we moved with it?”

Reinvention does not mean constantly abandoning what works. It means staying curious enough to recognise when something needs to be adapted for the environment we are now operating in.

Your Calendar Is Full. But What Actually Changed?

Q: Leaders often pride themselves on being busy, but busyness isn’t always momentum. How can executive teams tell the difference between productive activity and work that merely creates the illusion of progress?

A: For me, the simplest test is: What moved because of the work?

A team can have a very full calendar. Meetings are happening. Campaigns are launching. Strategies are being written. New initiatives are being announced.

All of those things can be useful. But activity on its own does not tell us whether the organisation is getting closer to what it wants to achieve.

Depending on the goal, meaningful progress might mean customers responding differently, conversion improving, decisions becoming easier, teams becoming more aligned, or an opportunity that was stuck finally starting to move.

That is why I distinguish between output and movement.

A campaign is an output.
A strategy document is an output.
A meeting is an output.

The more useful question is what changed because of it.

And sometimes progress comes from subtraction.

Stopping an initiative, narrowing the market, changing the sequence of priorities, or saying no to an attractive opportunity can create more movement than starting another project.

Being busy tells you how much activity is happening.

Momentum tells you whether something that matters is actually changing.

Before You Say Yes, Ask What It Unlocks

Q: If every leadership team could step back and ask one question before committing to its next strategic initiative, what should that question be, and why?

A: I would ask: “If this works, what will it unlock?”

I like this question because it makes us look beyond the initiative itself and think about what we actually expect to change.

If we hire this person, what becomes possible?

If we enter this market, what are we hoping it unlocks?

If we invest in this technology, what friction are we trying to remove?

If we launch this campaign, whose perception, behaviour, or decision are we hoping to change?

There will not always be one perfect answer. Some investments take time. Some are experiments. And sometimes several moves have to work together.

But the question forces us to connect action with consequence.

That is what the One Move means to me. It is not necessarily the biggest move, the boldest move, or the most expensive move.

It is the move that has the potential to change what becomes possible next.

And that brings me back to the ember.

Sometimes an organisation does not need another fire started from scratch. The capability, ambition, relationships, or opportunity may already be there.

The work is to see the ember, find the One Move, and burn brighter.

Final Thoughts: The Hardest Strategy May Be Choosing What Not to Do

Growth creates options. So does ambition.

The difficulty for leadership teams is that more options do not automatically create more progress. At some point, strategy requires choosing where not to invest attention.

That is perhaps the more challenging implication of Tan’s One Move philosophy. Identifying leverage isn’t simply an exercise in finding the next initiative. It may require narrowing a market, questioning a successful playbook, stopping work that no longer changes outcomes, or saying no to an opportunity that looks attractive on its own.

For leaders accustomed to demonstrating progress through action, subtraction can feel counterintuitive.

But the measure Tan returns to is not how much an organisation is doing. It is whether something important has moved.

Sometimes the next stage of growth begins not by adding another priority, but by becoming much clearer about which one deserves to survive.

Read the Chinese article here.