The goal setting and pursuit ladder
What world-class strategy execution and org-wide goal setting looks like.
How goals get set, owned, pursued and rewarded decides what your strategy is actually worth. Designing that on purpose is some of the highest-leverage work a leadership team ever does. Most have never done it.
Budgets, forecasts, dashboards and goals down the org chart will run a company. They won't move a strategy. They won't create and sustain your advantage. They won't cement a culture that keeps people loyal and attracts the best talent.
The ladder
What you get. A company that can be financed, and a year that can be planned.
What it can't do. When you miss, you learn that something's wrong. You don't learn what, or where, or in time.
What you get. Problems surface in weeks instead of at year end.
What it can't do. A dashboard describes, it doesn't decide. Most dashboards we see are generic and look like they were inherited, so they can't tell you they're measuring the wrong things.
What you get. Effort has a direction, and people know what good looks like.
What it can't do. A target on a number you already track can only ask for more of the same. There's nowhere in it to put a different approach, which is why every function's plan ends up being its own job description with a bigger number on the end.
What you get. You stop competing on the same dimensions as everybody else. You stop being 'me-too' and start being obviously better.
What it can't do. Guarantee the choices are right. A choice needs to be explicit, tested and adapted if the evidence says it should.
What you get. You find out whether the strategy is working while there's still time to change it. And your dashboard stops being something that would work unchanged in a competitor's boardroom.
What it can't do. A new measure has no history either, so the first target you set on it is a guess, and it's worth saying so upfront rather than defending it for twelve weeks.
What you get. People taking aim, accountability, and a report.
What it can't do. It doesn't make sense to every team and employee all of the time because it's too basic.
What you get. The last kind stops being a goal and becomes a number with a floor under it. Which frees the quarter for the work that was actually going to change something, and stops a plan filling up with things that were always going to happen anyway.
What it can't do. Allow for the differences in risk profile and level of experimentation required.
What you get. People will take on the goal that might not work.
What it can't do. Guarantee the quarter was worth the cost. Sometimes it wasn't, but the learning and the cultural signal were there if handled well.
What you get. Cross-functional work stops dying between functions, which is where most stalled strategic projects actually die. Not from lack of effort, from having no single owner and four half-owners.
What it can't do. Solve capacity. Goals can flow. People can't, or not as freely, and anything needing a new team still waits for a moment when nobody has committed yet.
What you get. Value streams that run over several quarters, sequenced so something lands early and keeps landing. The horizon matches the work rather than the calendar, and a team can see where their piece sits in a plan that makes sense to them.
What it can't do. It can't work without a limit on how many start at once. Nothing new begins until something finishes or stops.
What you get. Shoehorning everything that matters into one framework like OKRs makes no sense and leads to mediocrity. A portfolio of work being in progress is common sense; give you a toolkit that works.
What it can't do. It can't be achieved in a week. It takes 3 - 4 quarters to become how you operate and loved.
What you get. Your teams are already using AI via your preferred LLM. Embedding this ladder in yours is how you make how you operate stick and help team to go faster.
What it can't do. See what customers want, be creative, come up with genuinely new ideas, and energise your team.
The capabilities we build to climb the ladder
C1 to C2 is where most attempts stop: a workshop, a template, a deck, and everybody goes back to their week. No owner, so it drifts. No coaching, so nothing transfers.
Rungs 01 to 06 need C1 and C2. Rungs 07 to 12 need all five, because judgement can't be templated and consequence can't be delegated.
Three reasons this can't be you
Getting help here isn't weakness. It's arithmetic.
Everything in there looks normal, because it's just how things get done here.
You can't diagnose a system you're standing inside.
None of you can chair that conversation cleanly.
Which few things to actually do is a decision you and your SLT all have skin in. We have watched bias dilute the right answer more times than we can count.
There's no professional body for this one.
Lawyers have a body that trains them and holds them to a standard. Anyone designing how a company plans, measures, judges and rewards has a management qualification that skipped it, a book or two, and what they saw work somewhere else.
Patterns, gotchas, slides, templates, agenda and hours, mostly. Duller than it sounds.
You have a day job that fills all of yours. This is ours, and it's what our success gets measured on. We've seen what works and what doesn't at scale, so we can match it to your context rather than hand you the average, and we know which versions hold when a quarter goes badly.
The diagnostics, the learning assets and the people to run a programme already exist, with a human in the loop at every point that matters.
These are what's missing almost everywhere. Each one is a piece of work with a name, in the order it tends to happen.
Then step seven loops back to the design, which is what stops it being a project with an end date.
How long
a few quarters, not a programme
What the weekly conversation is about. You feel that one immediately, because it's a different meeting and people notice inside a fortnight.
Your measures and goals belong to your strategy instead of your industry, and the difference between a bet and a routine is visible to everybody.
Your managers are running it without us.
Not a transformation programme. A few quarters, most of it spent changing what gets asked rather than what gets built.
Come and tell us where you are on the ladder, and we'll tell you what the next two rungs would take.
45 minutes, free, no pitch afterwards. Bring one or two real goals as they are written today. You'll leave with a view on which rungs your year actually needs, and which you can ignore.
Worth doing first, on your own: sort your current goals into the ones you could hit by doing what you already do slightly better, and the ones you couldn't. If both piles are measured, reviewed and rewarded the same way, you've found your rung.