Annual Event Offers Tools to Prioritize, Focus and Make Progress

What can move a room full of university leaders to spontaneous applause? In 2024, it was this question from an attendee at the inaugural Breakfast and Brainwork Event for implementation plan contacts:

“How can the university help leaders discern what to stop doing, to make room for new initiatives?” 

The applause after this question did more than signal widespread agreement. It revealed a fundamental truth about initiative success: ambitious organizational goals are achieved when people have the necessary capacity to focus on them.

At the 2025 Breakfast and Brainwork Event, attendees revisited this topic again — sharing success stories about “strategic sunsets” and processes that successfully resulted in an activity’s end. Their discussion resulted in a set of questions for leaders to ask when considering an activity’s strategic sunset:

• Is it clear who has the authority to make decisions about this activity?

• Is the activity’s purpose clear and relevant?

• What is the activity’s value that should be preserved, even if in another format?

• Is anyone else doing this activity, to serve as a partner or lead it?

• Can the activity’s scale be adjusted to match resource availability?

• What are the consequences of changing the activity, or not?

• What do those responsible for the activity, and those who benefit from it, think?

That brings us to the 2026 Breakfast and Brainwork Event, where Institutional Effectiveness (IE) returned to this topic once again, this time equipping attendees with tactics and practical tools to prioritize, focus and make progress.

The 2026 Toolkit: Prioritize, Focus and Make Progress

Start-Stop-Continue and Ecocycle Planning were among the practical tools shared with event attendees to help them prioritize, focus and make progress towards initiative success. 

• Start-Stop-Continue is an immediate, versatile and simple tool. In as little as 15 minutes, virtually or in person, a team can pause and reflect on what has and has not worked. Ideal times to use this tool include at a project milestone or at the close of a meeting, program, event or project.

• Ecocycle Planning, one of the Liberating Structures for innovating in groups, offers a holistic and continuum-based view of a group’s activities along a natural lifecycle. Leaders and teams can use it to realize both new and mature ideas and the opportunities to reallocate time and other resources between them.

Why We Gather

Beyond the tools, the annual Breakfast and Brainwork Event serves as dedicated time to:

• Recognize and appreciate contacts and their leadership towards achieving Wolfpack 2030 Strategic Plan goals; and

• Share IE’s Strategy and Implementation Team progress on priority projects. This year, those included steps to visualize the people impact of NC State’s implementation plan and the continuing development of Pack Practices for Successful Initiatives.

Do It Yourself

The insights and tools featured in this article are useful for implementation plan contacts as well as other leaders throughout the university. If you or your team need help recapturing and reallocating time for high-priority efforts, then consider trying the simple Start-Stop-Continue exercise together. Where you agree on an activity to stop, run that activity through the set of questions listed above.

Questions about tools to prioritize, focus and make progress? Contact Genevieve Rockett, implementation specialist for Institutional Effectiveness, at gcrocket@ncsu.edu.