Portfolio – a declaration of what deserves your attention

Before it had anything to do with money, strategy or the sort of PowerPoint presentation in which someone explains that the portfolio is “balanced”, a portfolio was a thing you could actually carry.

Usually it was a flat case, often made of leather, carried under the arm by somebody who probably had better handwriting than most of us and considerably less need for more PowerPoints.

It was there to keep loose papers, drawings and documents together while moving from one room to another, or perhaps from one merchant to another, so that the important bits of work did not become scattered between the desk and the train.

The word comes from the Italian portafoglio: porta, to carry, and foglio, a leaf or sheet of paper, with the deeper root in the Latin portare, to carry.

Literally, then, it was the thing that carried the papers. I rather like that.

Because somewhere along the way we took this very ordinary object and turned it into an abstract business noun, and in doing so we lost something useful.

A portfolio became the collection inside the case rather than the case itself, and then, gradually, the idea of a collection became attached to the deliberate management of that collection. The object disappeared, the contents became important, and then the act of choosing and tending those contents became the point.

Case, to collection, to a collection someone is looking after on purpose.

An investment portfolio, a product portfolio, a project portfolio, a creative portfolio: all of them still contain that original idea if you look closely enough. They are sets of things someone has chosen to hold together because there is some reason for them to belong together. They are containers with a purpose.

Which makes a portfolio rather different from a list.

A list can contain almost anything. A backlog is even more accommodating: every request anyone has made, every idea leaders have had on the commute, every commitment that was made in a meeting where it was quicker to add to the backlog than discuss whether it really needed doing, and every small thing that somebody said would be “quick”.

A portfolio has to be more particular and fussy.

Because, it is a decision.

Every organisation has more portfolios than it tends to notice: products, projects, customers, technology, suppliers, capabilities, investments, people and a sometimes staggeringly elaborate collection of things that have acquired the word “strategic” somewhere along the way.

Creating these collections is not hard. In fact, it's really quite easy. We are exceptionally good at adding things. Give an organisation a new work management tool and it won't be long until it's filling up.

The difficult bit though is deciding what belongs, and being clear about what does not.

Imagine the old physical object again, sitting under your arm, a finite case with a finite amount of room inside it. You are on your way somewhere. You cannot put everything in it. You have to decide what is worth carrying.

The modern version doesn't arrives as such an obvious decision. It sounds more like, “While we're in here, could we also do this?” or, “It's only a little project,” or, “We've not managed to get funding for it anywhere else, but could it live in your portfolio?”

None of these requests are wholly unreasonable, which is why they are so effective. The portfolio rarely gets ruined by one spectacularly stupid decision; it gets filled one harmless addition at a time, until the chosen set of work becomes a drawer full of projects, ideas, obligations, experiments and inherited commitments, all technically belonging to something but increasingly difficult to connect to why that something exists.

At that point you are no longer carrying a portfolio.

You are carrying a drawer. Or a trunk. Or a digital closet.

And once the drawer is full, the organisation typically reaches for the things organisations reach for when clarity has gone missing: another report, another governance meeting, another dashboard, another committee, another layer of control, perhaps even another expensive piece of software to help us understand the expensive collection of software we already bought.

It is a corporate form of organisational self-sabotage, because the problem is often not a shortage of information, or reports, or tech, or storage, or apps, or people. It is that the thing we are trying to understand no longer has a clear enough shape. We have lost visibility.

At its best, a portfolio keeps a thread visible between investment, activity and value.

Something is invested, something happens as a consequence, and something valuable is expected to emerge.

That does not mean the thread is perfectly predictable, or that every pound spent can be converted neatly into a number on a dashboard, but it does mean there is a story connecting what we chose to carry with why we thought it was worth carrying.

When that thread is visible, decisions become considerably easier. You can see what needs protecting, what deserves more room, what might benefit from acceleration, what needs slowing down, and what has probably done what it came to do. And importantly, what does not belong in your portfolio.

There is something rather more human about the original meaning of portfolio, too. A person carrying a portfolio has made a judgement about what is worth carrying. The contents represent a choice about what deserves time, energy, attention, money, and protection while they are on their way somewhere else.

That seems much closer to what we actually mean when we talk about investment at work. When we consider that all we are ever doing at work is taking an idea and turning it into something valuable.

Because investment is not just money. It is attention, time, energy, expertise, patience and the finite resources of human beings put into making something that matters.

Work is not short of ideas. Ideas are probably the least scarce resource in most organisations. We have meetings specifically designed to manufacture them, software designed to capture them and entire programmes devoted to generating more of them. The problem is rarely that nobody has thought of anything.

The problem is what we decide to carry.

Which is why I increasingly think a portfolio is less like a spreadsheet and more like a declaration.

It says: these are the things we have chosen to hold together. These are the things we are willing to give attention to. These are the things we think are worth the investment, the human effort and the future we are trying to make real.

And, inevitably, it also says: these other things are not going in the case.

That is not a failure of imagination. It is the consequence of having finite resources and taking them seriously.

Perhaps that is the bit of the old word worth rescuing.

A portfolio is not simply a collection of things. It is a container designed with intent, carried towards somewhere, holding things that someone has decided are worth carrying.

The quality of the portfolio, then, has surprisingly little to do with how much it contains.

It has much more to do with whether you can still see why you are carrying it.

You may also like:

An in-depth look at Portfolio Management, along with an edition of The Department of Interesting Things, and a few free guides too.

If you're in the Technology space, you might find the Tech Portfolio Field Guide very helpful too. And it's free.