Creating capacity for goals
Creating capacity is the work done before a cycle starts to find the hours its goals will need, by delegating, pausing or eliminating something already running. A goal set without that audit is a hope with a deadline attached.
The obvious bit
Ask a leadership team what will stop next quarter to make room for what they have just committed to, and the room usually goes quiet.
That silence is the most reliable predictor of a missed goal we know. Not ambition, not framework choice, not tooling. The goal was added to a full week and everyone hoped.
The arithmetic that makes this unavoidable
A hundred people is roughly 184,000 hours a year. Most of it, call it seventy percent, goes on keeping the promises you have already made, and that is the business working rather than waste. Which leaves around thirty person-years to change the company.
Three goals a cycle means real weight behind each. Ten means a third of a person per goal. Focus is division, not philosophy, and the division happens whether you do it deliberately or not.
The audit: delegate, pause, eliminate
Run it against the current commitments of the specific people the new goals depend on. Not the department. The individuals.
Delegate. What is this person doing that somebody else could do adequately? Adequately is the bar, not better. Most senior calendars carry work held onto out of habit or preference.
Pause. What could stop for one cycle with a consequence you can name and accept? Naming the consequence is the discipline; without it, nothing feels pausable.
Eliminate. What is running because it always has? Reports nobody reads, meetings inherited from a structure that no longer exists, approvals designed for a company a third of this size.
The third category is usually the largest and the hardest to see, because it is invisible from the inside. It is also the one where the hours are genuinely free.
What to do when the audit fails
Sometimes there is nothing to give. That is a real answer, and the correct response is to cut the goals rather than proceed and hope.
Two goals fully resourced will beat four half-resourced in any cycle we have ever watched. And the cost of the fourth goal is not just its own failure: it is the drag it puts on the other three, plus the lesson everyone takes about what a commitment means here.
The failure modes
Capacity assumed rather than checked. The plan is sound at department level and impossible for the four people it actually rests on.
Capacity promised and then taken. The resource arrives, then gets pulled in week three for something urgent. Do that twice and teams stop believing stated capacity, then quietly scale their goals down to what they can manage without help.
The audit done once. Business as usual grows back. The audit is a per-cycle habit, not a one-off clean-up.
Our opinion
This is the least glamorous item in the whole methodology and the one with the highest return. It is also the one leadership teams most want to skip, because it requires saying no to something already running, in front of the person running it.
We would rather have that conversation in the planning session than discover the answer in week nine.
One line to keep: nobody ever finds capacity mid-cycle, so the audit happens before the goals are agreed or it does not happen at all.
How many goals can a team actually run? +
Two or three per cycle for most teams, and fewer than people expect once you divide the real strategic hours by the number of goals. Two fully resourced beats four half-resourced every time.
What if there is genuinely nothing to pause? +
Then cut the goals. Proceeding with a goal you cannot resource costs you the goal, the drag on everything beside it, and the credibility of the next commitment you make.
When should the audit happen? +
Before the goals are agreed, never after. Capacity is never found mid-cycle, so an audit that happens once the commitments are public is a formality.
From the ZOKRI OKR Handbook, the methodology we install and maintain. Written by Matt Roberts.
A UK-based strategy and OKR consultant and two-time SaaS founder with a venture-backed exit, Matt turns strategy into execution for teams scaling from tens to thousands. He co-founded ZOKRI in 2018, having previously co-founded Linkdex, a venture-backed enterprise SaaS platform he led to a trade sale. He writes the methodology behind these notes.
We run the delegate, pause, eliminate audit with you before a cycle starts, on the real calendars of the real people. It is the least popular session we run and the one that changes the most.