We don’t just react to the world, we model it. We look for patterns, test assumptions and decide where to place our effort. This is an idea that’s easy to like, but I’ve learned how readily those models warp under pressure. Keep saying yes, keep moving, hope momentum will turn into progress. It often doesn’t.
That was my mistake at Public|Policy Southampton. On paper, everything looked promising: strong civic partnerships, direct access to policymakers, visible support from leadership. But I was everywhere and going nowhere.
In academia and policy, I discovered that friction is often mistaken for failure. So, I decided to assume the opposite: that many problems persist because we tackle them at the wrong scale. I began to act as if most problems are local until proven otherwise. In this case, “local” means close enough to understand, fast enough to learn from, and relevant enough to act on. And if I can act, I’m not stuck.
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Then I recognised the pattern. I was spreading myself too thinly. Like Yahoo! in the now-famous Peanut Butter Manifesto, I was doing too much, too evenly, and excelling at nothing. The principle that helps individuals focus applies to institutions, too. Strategy isn’t the sum of everything you’re willing to do, it’s the few things you choose to do instead.
Reframing my approach, I stopped asking: “Is this project worthwhile?” and started asking: “Is this mine to do?” That subtle shift re-centred my attention from broad ambition to accountable action. I didn’t build another strategy document; I built a working interface: a bridge between research and decision-making. That meant aligning what the university already had – our databases, our expertise – with the needs right in front of me. I mapped internal assets such as Pure and ePrints to local priorities: freight emissions, digital inclusion, skills gaps. Then I reshaped research outputs into policy-ready briefs, not for compliance but for consequence.
That shift in mindset helped me see Southampton’s assets differently. Wind tunnels, data collectives and high-voltage labs viewed narrowly are academic facilities. But seen through a civic lens, they’re infrastructure for the region. When I started presenting them that way, it changed the conversation. We weren’t just asking for collaboration; we were inviting joint stewardship. Our partners became co-investors in shared capability, tools with public purpose.
The same logic applies to our AI strengths: agentic systems, maritime autonomy and clean freight. These aren’t just research themes, they’re tools for governing regional development, if we chose to use them that way.
In both Westminster and academia, it’s easy to keep adding functions: skills, growth, innovation, civic pride. But good strategy resists this temptation. That’s the core of David Willetts’ recent provocation Are Universities Worth It?: value isn’t something we whisper about in spreadsheets. It’s something we demonstrate through trade-offs.
That’s why I now use a simple tool: a one-page What I’m Not Doing This Year. It started as a personal exercise, distinguishing political compliance from genuine commitment. But it became institutional. It provides the language to make trade-offs visible: turning down funding lines that dilute focus, protecting reflective time for early career researchers, and rebalancing team responsibilities under pressure.
This is what coherence looks like, not doing everything for everyone, but doing the few things that matter most and doing them well. It’s a form of radicalism that isn’t nostalgic or defensive: it’s hyper-focused, place-based and open-eyed.
By building these tools in partnership with the city council and logistics firms, we’re not merely deploying technology, we’re shaping the region’s capacity to meet its net zero carbon goals. We’ve reimagined our Science Park as an innovation engine, not a passive landlord. It’s a place where university researchers and company engineers co-create solutions in real time. And we’ve made our work in responsible AI, long a research strength, the backbone of how these systems are governed. At the Web Science Institute, our ethicists and data scientists work side by side to define the values and constraints that shape what AI should do, not just what it can do. That’s what coherence looks like, too.
The peanut butter metaphor works because it names something real: the paralysis of vague ambition. I saw first-hand the kind of institutional paralysis that comes from trying to do a bit of everything, spreading efforts so thin that nothing sticks. The cure was a kind of radical focus. And in writing about strategy, I believe the same principle applies: we should speak plainly, say what we mean, and sound like ourselves. An op-ed like this should feel rigorous in thought but resonant in tone. Ideally, it leaves the reader with both an insight and a feeling.
For me, that insight is about focus. If we’re serious about delivering on grand initiatives, our university’s much-touted triple helix partnership of academia, industry and government, we have to be equally serious about the trade-offs they demand. We have to be willing to name what we won’t do, to show what we choose not to pursue, and to repeat that message until it becomes cultural muscle memory.
Alistair Sackley is specialist policy officer in the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton.
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