We Agreed to Diversify. We Never Started.
Why broadening an economy or a business is the easiest decision to make and the hardest one to begin.
Published 4 September 2026 · 6 min read · 6 movements · Harpi Advisory
The Scene.
The strategy document exists. That is the part worth sitting with.
Somewhere in the organisation there is a slide, a report, a retreat’s worth of notes, all saying the same thing: we are too dependent on one thing and we should not be. The language is usually confident. Diversify the revenue base. Reduce concentration risk. Build a second engine. Nobody in the room disagreed. Nobody has disagreed in years.
And yet the revenue mix this year looks almost exactly like it looked three years ago.
Not because the plan was wrong. The plan was rarely even examined closely enough to be wrong. It was approved, filed and revisited at the next retreat, where it was approved again, sometimes with a new consultant’s logo on the cover page.
This is a different failure from the one that freezes an organisation in front of a single visible opportunity. There is no single decision being avoided here. There is a direction everyone has agreed to walk in and a distance of exactly zero that anyone has walked.
Everyone agreed. Nobody moved. Then, a year later, everyone agreed again.
How It Forms.
Because diversification is the only strategic decision an organisation can keep making without ever having made it.
Most decisions have a moment. A contract is signed or it is not. A hire happens or it does not. Diversification has no such moment by default. It does not fail in an afternoon and it does not succeed in one either. It is not a decision so much as a direction and a direction can be affirmed indefinitely without anyone ever taking the first step down it.
Three mechanics keep it that way.
The core business is never a good time to leave alone.
Diversification competes for capital, attention and the best people against a core business that is, by definition, the thing currently working. Every year offers a plausible reason the timing is wrong: too much demand right now, too little margin to spare right now, a leadership transition, a market dip. The core business will always have a more urgent claim on this quarter than a second engine that does not exist yet.
Nobody owns the failure to start.
A missed sales target has an owner. A stalled diversification effort does not, because it was never actually launched. There is no project, no budget line, no person whose job depends on it, so there is no forum in which its absence gets raised as a problem. It is simply always the next thing.
Agreement substitutes for commitment and it is renewable.
Each time the topic resurfaces the room can agree again and mean it and that agreement feels like progress. It is not. Agreeing that something matters and committing resources to it are different acts and an organisation can perform the first one every year for a decade without ever doing the second.
How It Hides.
It hides in plain sight, inside a document everyone has read.
The tell is not silence. It is repetition. The clearest sign of this pattern is a strategy that keeps getting re-approved rather than executed: the same slide, the same three target sectors, the same rationale, appearing in successive years with only the market data refreshed.
The tells
- The diversification effort has a slide but no budget line.
- No one can say what was different about this year’s version of the plan from last year’s.
- The initiative is perpetually early stage, for several years running.
- Progress is measured in studies commissioned, not revenue diversified.
- Every setback in the core business becomes the reason diversification must wait and every success becomes the reason it can wait a little longer.
From the corridor
The economy has been growing while its base narrows. Tourism does the work, while the older pillars of refining, financial services and logistics show little movement and more output rests on fewer engines each year.
It is not new and has been available for years. What is harder to find is the year an organisation, or an economy, actually reallocated meaningfully away from the concentration everyone already agreed was a risk.
What It Costs.
The cost is not visible in any single year, which is exactly why it accumulates for so long.
Your choices narrow quietly.
Every year the core business remains the only engine, the organisation becomes more dependent on the conditions that favour it and those conditions were never guaranteed to hold. The diversification that would have been a moderate effort five years ago becomes a much larger one now, because the muscle for building anything new has not been used in the meantime.
The talent for building leaves.
People who want to build new things do not wait indefinitely inside an organisation that only ever discusses building them. They leave for one that is actually doing it and the ability to carry out diversification erodes at precisely the moment the organisation would most need it.
The eventual shock finds no runway.
When the core business does turn, through a price cycle, a competitor, a regulatory shift or a resource in decline, the organisation is not one year behind on diversifying. It is however many years behind the plan was first approved and it now has to build a second engine under pressure rather than by choice, which is the most expensive way to do it.
The record shows good intentions.
A decade of approved strategy documents makes it easy to believe the organisation tried and the market simply did not cooperate. That is rarely the honest account. The market was not the obstacle. Nothing was ever actually launched.
Discipline chosen during abundance is strategy. An intention repeated during abundance is not.
What Breaks It.
Not more conviction. The room is already convinced and that has never been the shortage. What breaks this pattern is converting a direction into a decision, with the features only a decision has.
Give diversification a budget line, not a slide.
A commitment with no capital behind it is a preference, not a plan. The number does not need to be large. It needs to exist, be visible and be defended in the same budget conversation as everything else, which forces the organisation to choose it over something rather than approve it in isolation where it costs nothing.
Name an owner whose role depends on it.
Not a committee and not a working group. A person whose performance is actually measured by whether the second engine advances, not by how well the studies were conducted.
Set a date for the first irreversible step.
Not a target for the diversified revenue share in five years. A date, inside ninety days, by which some resource has been committed that cannot be quietly reabsorbed into the core business the next time it has a good quarter.
Protect the effort from the core business’s good years.
This is the one most often missed. A stalled diversification effort is usually killed not by a bad year, which creates urgency, but by a good one, which removes it. The budget line and the owner need to survive precisely the years when everything else is going well and diversification feels least necessary, because those are the only years in which it can be built without the pressure of an emergency.
Measure movement, not conviction.
The right annual question is not whether the room still believes diversification matters. It is what, concretely, moved this year that could not be undone.
The Turn.
Return to the document.
It was not wrong and the people who approved it were not being dishonest. They meant it every time. The failure was never a failure of belief. It was the absence of the unglamorous machinery, a budget, an owner and a date, that turns a belief into a fact on the ground.
An organisation can agree with itself for a decade and call it strategy. What it has actually built, in that decade, is a very well documented reason for why nothing changed.
The plan was never the hard part.
Starting it, in a year that did not feel urgent, is the work almost no organisation does.
Advice for organisations facing decisions that will not wait. Based in Guyana, operating across the Guyana ● Suriname ● Curaçao corridor.
This is general commentary on patterns we see across organisations, not advice on any particular situation. .