The Goals

The ideas list

Some of the best ideas in your business aren't goals yet, and forcing them to become goals is how opportunities and resources get wasted.

To get a great list of ideas that might become goals, someone has to write the brief. I spent years in advertising, where the brief is a craft object and somebody's whole job is writing it. Your strategy document and the accompanying meeting are the brief. The words, the measures and how you share them and react to questions all matter.

Teams can develop ideas over days, weeks or months. In product management, it's sometimes called dual-track discovery - goal and discovery run in parallel.

The idea ...

The potential value of the idea …

The fit with our strategic choices …

The tests to increase confidence …

The effort required …

The decision …

And there is a second list nobody has

An idea is something nobody has tried yet. It goes on the list, it gets a cheap test against it, and it waits.

A finding is different. It came out of work you already did, it's real, and it just doesn't serve the objective you were chasing at the time. Not wrong. Not noise. Orthogonal.

The moment you set a measure, you create that second category by accident. Everything that is true, but doesn't count.

Most companies have somewhere for the first kind and nowhere at all for the second. Chapter ten is about that, and it's the half that compounds.

Simplicity comes at a cost

Before any of that, a decision has already been made for you, and almost nobody notices it.

You wonder why the company isn't more entrepreneurial. Why what you sell looks like what everybody else sells. Why every team's plan is last year, improved. It's rarely a culture problem, and it's rarely a hiring problem.

Generic goal guidance is written for the average case, and the average case is getting a bit better at something you already do. So the template asks for a target and a date. The review asks whether you're on track. Green is good.

Every one of those is the right instrument for incremental improvement. Every one of them is the wrong instrument for finding out whether something new works, because new work produces bad numbers before it produces good ones.

Nobody wrote incrementalism down as a policy. The template did it for them.

One approach to setting a goal is easier to explain, easier to certify, easier to put in a tool, and much easier to sell. That is why almost everyone sells one. Using a portfolio asks you to develop judgement, which feels complicated and looks like hard work. So how you execute strategy, run teams and evaluate performance has been dumbed down, and it works against exactly what you need your people doing more of now than ever. Thinking differently. Being original. Innovating.

The simple version works. It works fine. But you don't get an entrepreneurial company by asking people to be more entrepreneurial. You get one by optimising the system for it where it matters. And where you need more of what already works, sometimes better and sometimes faster, you optimise for that as well. Both are deliberate. Both are a design choice.

Here is what the choice is worth. In a controlled study, the only thing changed was when people were judged. Same task, same people, same money on the table. Judged across the whole period, about half of them tried anything new. Judged on the second half only, more than eight in ten did, and they found the better answer twice as often.

Nobody got braver. The review date moved.

So what follows isn't one template. It's variable approaches, inside the same company and often inside the same team, designed backwards from what success really means for that particular piece of work. That sounds like more work than it is. Most teams can already tell which kind of work they are doing. A team keeping the lights on knows, and so does a team betting the year on something untested. What they don't have is permission to use the right instrument, and their leaders aren't evaluating with the right instrument either.

This is the work we do at ZOKRI. We train leaders on what excellent looks like, and on how to use a small collection of precision instruments to optimise for what they really need to achieve.

Aim, then commit

Two separate acts, and collapsing them is what causes the trouble.

Aiming is deciding the objective and the outcomes, the measures, what would change your mind, and how confident you're to start with. It's thinking, and it's cheap.

Committing is naming who, with what skill, for how much of their time, between which dates, and what they are coming off to make room. It's a resourcing decision, and it's expensive.

Most planning processes set goals and treat them as commitments. An aimed goal looks exactly like a real one on a slide. That's why nobody notices until week nine.

What a commit actually looks like

This is the resourcing block from the template, filled in.

The last column is the one everybody skips, and it's the one that means anything. If nothing is coming off, nothing has been decided. The goal has been added to a full plate, and the plate will win.

Look at Tom's row. Right now, enterprise onboarding works because Tom does it. For eight weeks, his job is to get what he knows out of his head and onto a page somebody else can follow, and then to stop being the person who does it.

That is a hard conversation. Putting it in a table doesn't make it easier. It does make it visible, which is the only reason it happens at all, and it's the difference between a plan and a hope.

The sentence nobody wants to hear

The guidance on our template and LLM training files says this, and I would keep it word for word.

Goals that are wildly important should be resourced for success, which for many means a dedicated team spending eighty per cent or more of its time on achievement and learning. It might be that you can't start the goal until the team is available.

That last sentence is unpopular in a planning meeting, and it prevents the single most common failure in goal setting: starting four things badly instead of two things properly.

Objectives with Outcomes, not activity

The other half of a good goal is that it's quicker to explain.

And a note on choosing a few measures of success with targets, because this is where most systems quietly go wrong.

You need to choose a few metrics that, if achieved, would mean that your objective has been achieved.

Targets have three levels.

The starting value is where you're today, written down before you begin, because a target with no starting value is a wish with a decimal point in it.

The target is what success looks like.

And an optional stretch number is one that would be a step change, giving ambition a name and a safety net. We want to unlock the thought, “*What would need to happen to actually hit that*”, without being a noose to hang yourself. Innovation, new approaches, learning, and collaboration all live here.

What we do NOT do is score them using decimals and other nonsense.

At the end, the goal gets a grade, judged by a person who was there.

Excellent, good, fair, bad.

Chapter eight has the mechanics. The template has a worked example. The LLM can coach you to create a great goal.

And no bonus is ever attached to a team's goal number.

The moment somebody's pay depends on a number they helped set, they will set a number they are confident they can hit.

They aren't being dishonest. They are being sensible, and you built the incentive.

You probably do pay a bonus, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Chapter nine is about how to do that without undoing everything above.

How it goes wrong

Goals given to individuals. Goals have leads, but they belong to teams. Give one to a person and a shared outcome quietly turns into a performance record, and people start defending their own piece of it rather than helping with somebody else's.

Goals handed down from above. Teams should write their own, against the company's choices. It takes longer on the day. It's also the difference between a goal somebody owns and a goal somebody defends. You can't hand a person a number and then be disappointed that they don't feel responsible for it.

Goals for business as usual. The most common way this dies. Somebody points out that customer support matters too, and then finance, and then recruitment. Within a cycle, everything the company does has a goal attached, and none of them means anything.

Goals are for the work that changes the company. Everything that keeps it running belongs in the health measures instead, where it gets watched without being turned into a project.