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We've all been there. The exciting project that we can't make time for or can't get off the ground. Why do so many promising newsroom ideas stall, and what does it take for leaders to stop the rut?

A couple of sessions at the International Journalism Festival aimed to answer these questions.

Firstly, Felicitas Carrique (News Product Alliance), Michaël Jarjour (Trustfund), Lucy Küng (RISJ), and moderator Anita Zielina (Better Leaders Lab) first dissected why projects often die at the first hurdle.

Jarjour then led another session with Mayuri Mei Lin (MDIF), Kim Bode (Newspack), Sanne Breimer (Inclusive Journalism) and Amruta Byatnal (independent journalist) about the remedy, and their best hacks for getting projects into first gear.

Here's what we learned:

Watch out for project killers

Lucy Küng, a renowned media strategist and board advisor, offered a candid diagnosis of why strategy so often fails to translate into impact.

Burnout: Newsroom leaders have three jobs: keeping up with the news cycle, managing people and strategic planning. Trouble is, short-term fire-fighting is a long-term creativity killer:

"You will get the work done, you will deliver, you will do what's on the list, but there'll be no combining of things in an interesting way or breakthrough thinking. And that's essentially a lot of where the industry's got to."

Frontloaded strategy: When there is time for strategic planning, managers tend to underestimate the challenge........

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