The Goals
The ideas list
Some of the best ideas in your business are not 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 is 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 is real, and it just does not 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 does not count.
Most companies have somewhere for the first kind and nowhere at all for the second. Chapter ten is about that, and it is the half that compounds.
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 are to start with. It is thinking, and it is 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 is a resourcing decision, and it is expensive.
Most planning processes set goals and treat them as commitments. An aimed goal looks exactly like a real one on a slide, which is why nobody notices until week nine.
What a commit actually looks like
This is the resourcing block from the template, filled in.
| Name | Role and skills | Time % | From | Until | What they are coming off |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sarah Williams | Head of CS. Owns the path and the certification | 40% | Wk 1 | Wk 12 | The smaller-customer review cycle, paused |
| Priya Raman | CSM. Runs the cohort and the expansion step | 80% | Wk 1 | Wk 12 | Renewals admin, moved to operations |
| Tom Okafor | CSM. One of the two people who can currently do this. Turns what he knows into a path anyone can follow. | 60% | Wk 1 | Wk 8 | All new enterprise onboarding, deliberately |
| Dan Hersey | Operations. Instruments the 14-day window | 20% | Wk 1 | Wk 4 | Board pack automation, delayed a month |
The last column is the one everybody skips, and it is 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 does not make it easier. It does make it visible, which is the only reason it happens at all, and it is 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 cannot 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 is quicker to explain.
Launch the new onboarding flow by the end of the quarter
This is an activity. You can do it and change nothing.
New enterprise customers reach value on their own, on a path any CSM can run.
This is a great Objective. You cannot achieve it by shipping something, only by it working.
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 are 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 the stretch is a number 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 are not 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 is also the difference between a goal somebody owns and a goal somebody defends. You cannot hand a person a number and then be disappointed that they do not 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.