De kunst van het niet-doen

Why executional power begins with choosing what you do not do

By: Gabriella Monasso and Marie-Claire de Koning | OGSM Leaders & Jester Strategy

Late January, a board meeting. The managing director of a mid-sized housing association presents the annual programme. On a single A4, the year's production is laid out: new build, renovation, sustainability upgrades, liveability, digitalisation. Everything promised in the performance agreements, everything in the business plan, everything the municipality expects of the association. It looks impressive. And on paper, it is.

Below the surface, at the same time, the question lives of how much of this can really be delivered within the year. The construction department feels it, the controller sees it, the supervisory board recognises the pattern. But it is rarely made explicit which projects will come under pressure. Next year we will see, is often the unspoken reflex. Then we shift things again.

This is the paradox the sector is in. Housing associations are working hard, building more than ever and investing at historically high levels.¹ But at the same time it feels as if execution structurally trails ambition. The usual diagnosis is then that housing associations need to plan better. We think that diagnosis is too narrow.

The issue does not sit only in strategy or planning. It sits in making choices explicit: what will we do, and so what will we not do? As long as that choice is not made sharply in the boardroom, it is made implicitly every day in execution. And it is precisely there that the consequences arise that go beyond the annual programme.

When everything is important, nothing is directional

Walk through an average portfolio of intentions and you will find everything in it. Affordability for sitting tenants. Sufficient supply for first-time buyers. Accessible homes for older residents. Housing for status holders. Sustainability upgrades for the existing stock. New build in the growth regions. Demolition and replacement in the shrinkage areas. Mixed neighbourhoods. Liveability. Attention for vulnerable target groups. Mid-market rent. This is not an exception, it is the pattern.

The portfolio of intentions is so broad because it comes about as a sum total. The council wants affordability. The municipality wants volume. The tenants' association wants maintenance. The national government wants sustainability. Employees want room for the neighbourhoods they know. Everyone is right, everyone has a legitimate interest. So every interest ends up on the list. No one says out loud: we are no longer doing this.

That is an understandable mechanism. A housing association that drops a partial interest creates a conflict with the party behind that interest. A housing association that drops nothing creates satisfaction in the meeting room and dissatisfaction in execution. Boards, consciously or unconsciously, almost always choose the former. The portfolio of intentions therefore describes not what the association is going to do, but what the association does not dare to let fall.

That worked for a number of years. But the sector can no longer afford this. Housing associations are investing heavily: in 2024 almost €12.1 billion in maintenance and sustainability alone² and they finance 56% of their investments with debt, compared with 21% in 2020.³ The household balance is in the red by €48 per rental unit per month.⁴ That can last a few years, not ten. And while financial slack is running out, ambitions are growing larger: 30,000 new-build homes per year from 2029, 254,000 by 2035.⁵ The arithmetic outcome is well known: not all of this is going to fit.

The silent hierarchy of executability

If the board does not choose, the system chooses. And the system chooses predictably.

In every housing association a pattern emerges that is rarely named. Projects in straightforward neighbourhoods, with motivated tenants, clear ownership and a cooperative municipality, get off the ground first. Projects in neighbourhoods with stacked problems, with a complicated association history, with residents who are difficult to win over to moving or cooperation, get stuck. Not because anyone decides so, but because everyone in execution, project leader, contractor, participation officer, takes the path of least resistance when the pressure rises. And the pressure always rises.

The result is a silent hierarchy of executability. At the top are the projects that come in on time: new build on a clean plot, sustainability upgrades for a row of family homes with satisfied residents, renovation of a block of flats where the association of owners cooperates. At the bottom are the projects that really matter: the stacked sustainability task in a vulnerable post-war neighbourhood, the transformation question of a complex where care, liveability and structural condition coincide, the housing of a target group that needs help to take part in the moving process at all.

This hierarchy is not intentional. But it is there. And it says something painful: the housing association that wants to serve everyone on paper, in execution serves the easiest target group fastest. The most difficult task and usually also the most important task, shifts to the third quarter, to next year, to the next business plan. The paradox is bitter: the projects that add the most social value are systematically the projects that are delayed.

Anyone paying attention sees it in the figures too. The Aedes forecast shows that almost half (45%) of housing associations will not have enough land for their new-build ambitions after 2025.⁶ That "lack of land" is rarely a physical problem. It is a planning problem that should have been addressed years ago, but other dossiers were more urgent at the time. What is called "urgent" is, in many housing associations, synonymous with "more easily negotiable". Not with "most important".

Shifting is not choosing

Look at an average annual programme placed alongside itself for three years and you see the same phenomenon. Projects that were on the first annual programme are scheduled later in the year on the second. On the third annual programme they appear in the following year. They are never cut, never reconfirmed, never discussed. They shift.

Shifting feels like planning, but it is the opposite. A choice is explicit: we are doing project A and not project B, and here is why. Shifting is implicit: we still want both project A and B, but we note B a quarter later this year. No one has to account for a shift. No one has to say that project B was never actually going to succeed within this financial reality. The fiction stays in place, and every annual programme reconfirms that fiction.

This is more than a cosmetic problem. It is a governance problem. A supervisory board that approves an annual programme that shifts again every year is in a structure that no longer puts it in a position to steer. That is not because supervisory boards are not doing their work, they usually do it well, but because the information put before them does not prompt a choice. A list that promises everything compels no one to choose. A plan that adds up on paper stands in the way of a board-level conversation about real priorities.

And who pays the bill? Not the municipality lobbying for new build, not the tenants' association watching over affordability, not the national government demanding sustainability. Those parties get their item on the list and are reassured by it. The bill ends up with the target groups that have no lobby. With residents of the neighbourhood where the sustainability upgrade is pushed back another six months each time. With older people waiting for an adapted home that is in the portfolio of intentions but not in the hard-plan stage. With status holders, labour migrants, residents with a care need, groups that are prominent in every portfolio of intentions and at the back of every execution.

That makes the inability to choose no longer a planning issue, but a legitimacy issue. At the same time, this is not a reproach to housing associations. It is extraordinarily difficult to choose in a system in which almost every social task ends up with the housing association: affordability, sustainability, new build, liveability, care, housing for older people, status holders, vulnerable residents. Everything is urgent, everything is justified, and almost nothing can be done without the housing association. That is exactly why the problem is so stubborn. A housing association does not choose in an empty field, but under pressure from municipalities, tenants, supervisors, financiers and national ambitions. Shifting is then often not unwillingness, but an understandable way to make the tension temporarily bearable.

Three questions for the boardroom

We are not writing this piece to reproach a sector for what it tries to deliver every day. We are writing it because, in conversation with managing directors, we notice that many recognise the pattern but cannot find a way to break it. The conventional planning language: "we have to prioritise better", "we need more capacity", does not bite. Because the problem is not planning language. It is board-level language, and it belongs in the boardroom.

Three questions that can be asked in that room and are rarely asked:

Which three projects in your current pipeline are really not going to survive 2026, regardless of what is on paper? Write them down. Discuss them with your supervisory board. Not to scrap them, that does not have to happen straight away, but to have the conversation about the boardroom fiction in which they sit.
What do those projects have in common in terms of neighbourhood, target group or complexity? This is the uncomfortable question. There is usually a pattern. And the pattern shows where your execution power structurally drops away.
What does that say about whom you are in practice serving and whom not? This is the question that touches the core of what a housing association is. A housing association that dares to ask itself this question does something few organisations do: it confronts itself with the distance between its self-image and its practice.

The housing associations we accompany in this movement notice that these questions change more than any planning review. Not because planning is not important, it is, and we see the Planning proposition as an indispensable part of good governance, but because planning only works once choices have first been made. A portfolio conversation that begins with what we are not going to do delivers a fundamentally different outcome than a planning review that begins with how we fit everything in.

The art of not doing is for most housing associations an unpractised art. That is exactly why it is worth practising. Because as long as the annual programme contains everything, it contains no choice. And as long as there is no choice, the system makes the choice for you, to the detriment of those you are actually there for.

About the authors

Gabriella Monasso is Principal at Jester Strategy and director of OGSM Leaders, the spin-off that helps organisations actually execute great plans through an effective one-page plan. She is specialised in strategic planning, the OGSM methodology and complex stakeholder environments.

Marie-Claire de Koning is Senior Strategy Consultant at Jester Strategy. She works on strategy, governance models and organisational design. Her strength lies in connecting conceptual thinking to practical execution.

Sources

¹ Housing associations delivered 21,761 new-build homes in 2024, an increase of 22% compared with 2023. Aedes, Aedes-benchmark 2025: belangrijkste resultaten, 2025. Available at: aedes.nl/aedes-benchmark/aedes-benchmark-2025-belangrijkste-resultaten

² Aedes, Aedes-benchmark 2025: belangrijkste resultaten, 2025.

³ Aedes, Aedes-benchmark 2025: belangrijkste resultaten, 2025. The share of debt in the financing of investments has risen from 21% in 2020 to 56% in 2024.

⁴ Aedes, Fors meer nieuwbouw door corporaties, 2025. Available at: aedes.nl/aedes-benchmark/fors-meer-nieuwbouw-door-corporaties

⁵ Aedes, Aedes-forecast 2025, 2025. The multi-year budgets contain plans for over 254,000 new social rental homes by 2035; the ambition is to deliver 30,000 new social rental homes per year from 2029. Available at: aedes.nl/aedes-forecast/corporaties-bouwen-meer-nieuwe-woningen-snel-meer-bouwlocaties-nodig-voor-verdere

⁶ Aedes, Aedes-forecast 2025, 2025.