Rock Your Strategy

Author: Alex

  • How to Build Your OGSM With AI: A Step-by-Step Guide (With the Questions to Expect)

    How to Build Your OGSM With AI: A Step-by-Step Guide (With the Questions to Expect)

    Most people who sit down to build a strategy with AI make the same mistake in the first thirty seconds: they ask it to write the strategy.

    You’ll get something back. Well-structured, confidently worded, and completely generic — a plan that would fit any firm in your industry, which means it fits none.

    The alternative is to use AI the way you’d use a good facilitator: let it run the process, ask the questions and hold the standard, while you do the deciding. An afternoon’s work, and you get something you’ll still defend in June.

    Here’s what that session looks like, phase by phase, with the real questions and the quality bar each phase holds. It’s what the OGSM Strategy Builder does — but the process is the process, and you can get value from this post without buying anything.

    What do you need before you start?

    Not much, but the numbers matter. Have these to hand:

    • Revenue — last full year and the one before, so growth is visible.
    • Margin — gross, and operating if you have it.
    • Growth rate — actual, not aspirational.
    • Customer concentration — what share of revenue your largest customer represents, and your top five.
    • The one operational number your business runs on. Utilisation for a services firm, lead time for a manufacturer, covers per night for a restaurant, renewal rate for anything on contract. You know yours.

    Then two more things: two to four hours of real work, which almost nobody does in one sitting, and a working answer to why now? Nobody writes a strategic plan because it’s January. Something changed, or is about to, and that’s the real subject of the session.

    If a number isn’t to hand, estimate it, say so, and move on. It gets flagged later as something to verify.

    My worked example throughout: Marlow Instrumentation Services, a fourteen-person Midlands firm calibrating lab instruments for pharmaceutical and food-testing customers. Revenue £2.4m, growing 3% a year, gross margin sliding from 41% to 36%, largest customer 22% of revenue.

    Phase 0: What does the diagnosis actually ask you?

    Ten to twenty minutes, and the phase everyone wants to skip.

    It opens with real questions — what you do, who buys from you, how you’ve changed. Then the one that matters: what made you want to do this now?

    Then scope (whole business or one function?) and horizon — a 3–5 year strategic plan or a 1-year operating plan. Pick one. It governs how ambitious the objective can be, whether timelines read 2028 or Q3, and whether reviews are quarterly or monthly.

    Then the Five-Answer Test:

    Ask five of your leaders, separately, so they can’t hear each other: what is our strategy?

    You’ll get five answers. Each reasonable, each confident, and not one quite the same. Solo? The equivalent is: could your best customer say what you’re trying to be?

    Then the Seven Cardinal Sins self-diagnosis, asked one at a time. Are you deciding from a picture of your market that’s a few years old (Ignorance)? Do five leaders give five answers (Discord)? Could someone on the floor say what the company is trying to do (Confusion)? Does the daily work quietly contradict the stated strategy (Incongruity)? Is there someone who has to carry this who doesn’t believe in it (Doubt)? Does the plan need capabilities you don’t have yet (Incompetence)? Is it agreed, pinned up, and not moving (Inertia)?

    Most businesses recognise three or four. That’s normal, and worth saying out loud, because people get defensive here. The ones you name become the watchlist for every phase that follows.

    Finally: list everything the business is currently working on. Everything taking real time or money. It’ll be longer than you expect — twenty items is common. Nothing gets resolved now. That list comes back in Phase 5, and it’s the argument.

    Phase 1: How does the reality check work?

    Key figures first — the numbers you prepared. Then a SWOT, built by conversation rather than form-filling.

    The questions have teeth. Name a strength and you’ll be asked who else in your market would claim the same thing? Give a number and you’ll be asked where it came from. Each quadrant caps at three to five items: if a strength doesn’t make your top five, it isn’t a key strength.

    Marlow’s SWOT surfaced the pairing that mattered — their biggest weakness (a price list that hadn’t kept up with wage inflation) sitting against their biggest threat (two national providers undercutting them per instrument). That pairing became a strategy three phases later.

    Where your situation warrants it you’ll be offered PESTEL, market trends, Porter’s Generic Strategies, Five Forces or the 5P marketing mix. Where it doesn’t, you won’t. A fourteen-person firm doesn’t need Five Forces to work out that price competition has arrived.

    Phase 2: How do you land on an objective you’d defend?

    Twenty to forty minutes. It’ll feel long. It should — everything downstream is derived from this one sentence.

    You’ll be pointed back to your why now? answer, then asked a present-tense question that people find easier than the future-tense one:

    When a customer chooses you over the alternative today, why do they?

    The honest answer is usually the raw material for the second half of your objective.

    Then three options — three genuinely different bets, not three rewordings — each with what it commits you to and what it rules out. You choose, or say the real one is none of them.

    Marlow’s first attempt was typical:

    ❌ “Grow the business by delivering excellent service to our clients.”

    Three problems. “Grow” is an outcome, not a direction. “Excellent service” is a claim every competitor makes. And swap in a competitor’s name — it still reads fine, which means nothing was chosen.

    After three drafts:

    ✅ “Become the default calibration partner for regulated pharmaceutical and food-testing labs in the Midlands by making audit-ready documentation, not price per instrument, the reason customers stay.”

    That names a segment, names a mechanism, and rules something out — price-led work, about a third of their current enquiry flow.

    Then five quick tests: substitute a competitor’s name (does it still work?); could five people repeat it the same way after hearing it twice?; what does it rule out?; what would someone do differently on Monday?; and is it ambitious enough to be worth it, grounded enough that nobody laughs? More on the craft in how to write a great objective.

    Phase 3: How do you turn that into goals?

    Twenty to thirty minutes. Three to five SMART goals, each written so it can be checked without a conversation: [metric] from [baseline] to [target] by [date].

    It starts with the twelve-month question — we meet again in a year, it’s gone well, what’s different? — then two relentless follow-ups: how much? and is that ambitious enough? The second is where the real number appears. People’s first answer is almost always their safe answer.

    ❌ “Improve customer retention.”
    ✅ “Contract renewal rate from 81% to 92% by 31 December.”

    Two rules shape the set. At least one financial goal — every strategy eventually shows up in the money. And goals covering both halves of your objective, the “what” and the “how”. Marlow’s renewal and revenue goals cover the what; regulated-lab revenue share and documentation turnaround cover the how. A plan with only “what” goals can be hit by accident, doing all the things you said you’d stop.

    Then the gate, which is the most useful question in the method:

    If we achieve exactly these goals — and nothing else — have we succeeded?

    If something is missing, write a goal for it. If a goal could be missed entirely and you’d still say the objective was met, it’s a metric you like, not a goal — it belongs in the Dashboard. See Goals vs Measures.

    Phase 4: What makes the strategies phase uncomfortable?

    Thirty to fifty minutes, and the phase that matters most. Everything before this could be done by a thoughtful person with a spreadsheet. This is where something gets given up.

    You’ll be pushed back to the SWOT pairings — your biggest weakness is X and your biggest threat is Y; what specifically are you going to do about that? You’ll generate six or eight candidates and then be forced to cut to three to five. The cut is the work.

    Each one has to pass the tactic test. A strategy sets a direction; it does not spell out the work. If it still leaves a real “but how, exactly?” for the next phase to answer, it is pitched at the right level. If it already specifies the work in full, it is an initiative and belongs in Phase 5.

    ❌ “Improve our marketing.” — Too vague. Costs nothing to agree to.
    ❌ “Redesign the website.” — Too specific. That’s an initiative.
    ✅ “Win regulated-lab accounts from the national providers by selling audit-readiness and documentation turnaround instead of price per instrument.” — Owner: Priya.

    Every strategy gets a named owner. Not “the team”. A person who has to answer for it at the review.

    Then the We WILL / We will NOT list, which takes ten minutes and turns intentions into a decision:

    We WILLWe will NOT
    Focus on regulated pharma and food-testing labsQuote on single-instrument, price-only tenders
    Compete on documentation and turnaroundCompete on price per instrument
    Build accreditation depth in two instrument classesCover every instrument a customer owns

    The right-hand column is the one that matters and the one that gets skipped. When you resist, you’ll get prompts like what would your competitor be pleased to hear you’d decided to keep doing?

    For Marlow, that column meant walking away from roughly £180k of low-margin work. Someone had built that revenue. That’s what a real trade-off feels like.

    Phase 5: How do the measures get built?

    Thirty to forty-five minutes. Per strategy, two structurally different things, kept explicitly apart.

    The Dashboard — 2–4 KPIs, each with a definition, baseline, target, frequency and data owner. At least one leading, one lagging. Six to twenty across the plan.

    The Action Plan — 2–3 initiatives that cause the strategy to work, each with a caretaker and dates.

    The speedometer doesn’t make the car go faster. Without the Dashboard you’re flying blind; without the Action Plan you have targets and no engine. Full method in the complete guide to OGSM Measures.

    Three questions build a dashboard. If this strategy is working, what would change? Then the “so what?” filter — if this number moves, what decision follows? If none, drop it. Then: what would you need to see in ninety days, before the annual numbers land? That last one finds your leading indicator.

    ❌ “Number of sales calls made.” — Activity. Tells you what your team did, not whether it worked.
    ✅ Lagging: revenue from regulated labs — £912k to £1.44m — monthly — Priya.
    ✅ Leading: quotes issued to regulated labs — 4/month to 12/month — monthly — Priya.
    ✅ Initiative: rebuild the certificate pack so it’s audit-ready without customer follow-up — Dan — January to end of Q2.

    Anything without a baseline gets refused. If the baseline genuinely doesn’t exist, establishing it becomes the first initiative under that strategy.

    Then the capacity conversation, the antidote to Inertia. Your Phase 0 workload list comes back and every item goes into one of three buckets: continues, paused, stopped.

    You’ve got nine new initiatives on top of eighteen existing ones. Which existing ones stop? Not “deprioritised” — stopped. If everything stays, we execute nothing.

    Focus is not about adding. It’s about removing.

    Phase 6: What does the stress test look for?

    Fifteen to twenty-five minutes, delivered in three parts: what holds, what I’d challenge, and what I can’t verify.

    Mechanical checks first — counts, missing baselines, strategies without owners, activity metrics wearing outcome metrics’ clothing, an empty “will not” list. Then judgement: the competitor test, the arithmetic test (do these strategies plausibly deliver these goals, or is it 28% growth against three efficiency initiatives?), the resourcing test, the capability check and the belief check.

    That third section is usually missing from AI strategy work, and it’s the honest bit. It has read everything and lived none of it. Your market size, a competitor’s intent, whether your team can absorb nine initiatives — those come back to you to check before the plan goes live.

    Where you disagree with a finding, it’s recorded as an accepted risk with your rationale and a watch-for. Not a defeat — a decision made with eyes open.

    Phase 7: How does it get delivered and cascaded?

    Fifteen to thirty minutes. The one-pager is built in the formats you want — HTML to share, Excel to track, PowerPoint to present, PDF to pin up.

    Then cascade guidance, if you have layers: a higher-level Measure becomes a lower-level Goal, cascaded to business and function level only, never to individuals. The named failure is cascading by copying rather than translating — a divisional plan that restates the corporate strategies in different words hasn’t cascaded, it’s photocopied.

    Then the communication plan — to whom, what, how, when, by whom — with three to five key messages you could repeat from memory. And the review calendar: monthly for a one-year plan, quarterly for a three-to-five-year one, with every meeting in the diary before the session ends. Agendas in how to run an OGSM review meeting.

    It closes by asking for three concrete things: the first review date, the first thing that stops, and the first visible win.

    Phase 8: What happens at the review?

    This phase repeats, and it is the one that decides whether the other eight were worth the afternoon.

    Before each review you bring the workbook back. It goes through the plan strategy by strategy — not metric by metric, because you think in strategies and a list of thirty numbers produces thirty guesses. Where are the numbers, and where are the initiatives?

    Then it does three things you would probably skip on your own.

    It compares against the plan rather than against last month. Not “did it go up?” but “is it on the path we said?” If the goal is a 30% improvement over twelve months and four months in you have moved 3%, it will tell you that you are a third of the way through the time and a tenth of the way through the distance. That sentence is more useful than any adjective.

    It checks the “we will not” list. Strategies are rarely reversed in a meeting. They get reversed one exception at a time. “You said you’d stop taking price-led work. Two of your last four wins were price-led. Either the strategy has changed or the behaviour needs to.”

    And it flags the item that has been amber for four months and never discussed — because amber feels survivable, and an initiative holding the same non-green status for three cycles is not a status, it’s a decision nobody is making.

    You get a prepared agenda with at-risk items first, and the short list of things that need a decision rather than a status update. Afterwards, you come back and say what was decided, and it goes into the workbook.

    One rule it will hold you to: don’t change a strategy because it’s uncomfortable. Give it two or three review cycles. Most strategies look wrong at month three, because the cost has arrived and the benefit hasn’t. Folding then is the commonest way a sound plan dies. Change when the ground has genuinely moved — a competitor arrives, a customer concentration risk becomes an event — not when you have simply gone off it.

    How does saving and resuming work?

    At the end of every phase your progress is written to a workbook file and handed to you. Save it. To come back — next evening, next month — start a session, hand the file back, and you’ll be told in two sentences where you left off. Nothing you’ve decided gets redone.

    Use it. A plan built across four evenings beats one rushed in an afternoon, and Phase 4 benefits from sleeping on it.

    Frequently asked questions

    How long does it actually take?

    Two to four hours of real work — nearer two if your numbers are to hand and you decide quickly, nearer four if you take the analysis seriously. Most people split it across two or three sittings, which is what the save-and-resume is for. Phases 2 and 4 take the longest and should. If you finish in twenty minutes, you filled in a template.

    Can I use this if I already have a strategy?

    Yes — often the better use. Run Phase 0 and Phase 6 against what you have, then re-enter wherever your plan first breaks down. Usually Phase 4, because most existing plans have goals and initiatives but no actual choices.

    Do I need my leadership team in the room?

    Not to build the draft. But be clear what you’re producing. If you own the business, this is a decision. If you’re a manager in a company of four hundred, it’s a strong draft to take into a real conversation.

    What if I don’t have baselines for everything?

    Write [baseline: to be established by DATE] rather than leaving it blank, and make establishing it the first initiative. A target without a baseline is unfalsifiable — in nine months nobody will agree whether it was hit.

    Will the AI just agree with everything I say?

    It shouldn’t, and a good process is designed against it. Expect to be told an answer could apply to any company in your industry, and to be asked what you’d stop. If the session felt comfortable throughout, something was avoided.

    Can it decide my strategy for me?

    No, and you shouldn’t want it to. It doesn’t know your market, your customers, or what happened last time you tried this. It drafts options; choosing is yours. A strategy you didn’t choose is one you won’t defend when it costs you something.

    What happens after the plan is built?

    Phase 8, every month or quarter, for as long as the plan is live. Twenty to thirty minutes with the workbook before the meeting you run with your team. See how to run an OGSM strategy review meeting for the agenda itself.

    Is this different from prompting Claude directly?

    Yes, in the way that matters: consistency of standard. A prompt gets one good answer. A process holds the same bar across eight phases, remembers Phase 0 when you contradict it in Phase 5, and refuses the shortcuts. If you’d rather work from prompts, how to use AI to build your OGSM has them.

    Where to go from here

    Nothing here requires a purchase. Open Claude, work the phases in this order, hold yourself to the quality bars, and you’ll produce something far better than a filled-in template — because the hard part is the questions, not the format.

    Read the common OGSM mistakes alongside it, and 30 OGSM examples across six industries if you want to see finished ones first.

    And if you’d rather not have to remember the questions or hold the standard yourself, the OGSM Strategy Builder does all eight phases with you and is available in the shop.

    Either way, do it before January. The plan you write in a quiet week is worth three you write under pressure.

    Rock on.

  • Why AI Should Facilitate Your Strategy, Not Write It

    Why AI Should Facilitate Your Strategy, Not Write It

    Ask any decent AI to write a strategic plan for your business and you’ll have one in about two minutes.

    It will have an objective, four or five goals with plausible-looking numbers, strategies in the right format, measures with owners, initiatives with quarters against them. It will look better than most of the strategy documents I’ve seen inside real companies.

    And it will be worthless.

    Not wrong, exactly. Worthless in the specific sense that nobody will change what they do on Monday because of it.

    That isn’t a limitation of the technology. It’s a fact about what strategy is. Once you accept it, the question stops being can AI write my strategy and becomes the useful one: what is AI actually good for here?

    What is AI genuinely good at in a strategy session?

    More than the sceptics allow. Four things, and they’re not small.

    It has no stake in the outcome. The big one. In every strategy session I’ve sat in, some part of the room is defending something — a product line someone built, a market someone owns, a headcount someone fought for. An AI has no career riding on Strategy 3, and has never had lunch with the person whose favourite project should be cut. Ask it what should stop and you get an answer, not a negotiation.

    It has infinite patience for the uncomfortable question. A human facilitator asks “and what would you have to stop doing?” twice, reads the room, and moves on to keep things pleasant. An AI asks a fourth time in the same even tone. That’s not stubbornness, it’s the absence of social cost — and the fourth asking is usually where the honest answer lives.

    It recognises patterns. A goal of 28% growth sitting above three cost-reduction initiatives doesn’t add up. A strategy every competitor would also write hasn’t chosen anything. An empty “we will not” column means the hard conversation was skipped. These are the common OGSM mistakes, and they are almost always thinking mistakes rather than template mistakes — which is exactly the kind of thing a machine spots quickly.

    It holds a consistent standard. Underrated, this one. Humans get tired. By hour four of a workshop the fifth strategy gets waved through with less scrutiny than the first. An AI applies the same bar to the last item as the first, at 9pm on a Thursday, on the fourth evening.

    That’s a genuinely useful colleague. A fast, well-read sparring partner who will ask the same hard question on a Sunday night as on a Tuesday morning, and who has no stake in which way you answer it.

    But it hasn’t lived through your last five years of business.

    What can AI not do?

    Four things, and each one is load-bearing.

    It doesn’t know your market. It knows what has been written about your market, which is a thinner thing. It doesn’t know the competitor everyone’s worried about has quietly lost their best engineer.

    It doesn’t know your customers. It knows archetypes. It doesn’t know your three biggest accounts all came from one person’s relationships, and that person is sixty-one.

    It doesn’t know your team’s real capacity. It can count initiatives against headcount. It cannot know Dan has been carrying two roles since March, or that ops said yes to the last three plans and delivered one.

    It doesn’t know what happened last time you tried this. Every business has a graveyard — the segment you entered in 2021 and quietly exited, the pricing change that lasted six weeks. That history is the most useful input to any strategy discussion, and it exists nowhere except in the heads of the people in the room.

    A strategy that ignores those four things is a well-formatted guess.

    Why is a two-minute plausible OGSM the worst possible outcome?

    Because plausibility is the trap.

    An obviously bad plan gets rejected. A clearly generic one gets sent back. But a plan that looks right — right format, right vocabulary, sensible-looking numbers — gets adopted. It goes on a slide. It gets presented at an all-hands. And then it sits there doing nothing, because underneath the format there was never a decision.

    Strategy is a choice. A specific direction, paid for by everything you decide not to do.

    An AI can generate the appearance of a choice instantly. It cannot make one, because making a choice requires having something to lose.

    This is why most strategies fail: not because leaders aren’t smart enough, but because they mistake aspiration for direction. AI-generated plans are aspiration at industrial scale — beautifully formatted, internally consistent, and nobody had to give anything up to produce them.

    Why does a strategy nobody chose become a strategy nobody defends?

    Here’s the test that matters. It’s June. A good customer asks for exactly the kind of work your strategy says you’ll stop doing. Real revenue, this quarter, sitting on the table.

    Who says no?

    Only someone who made the choice. Not someone who received it, agreed with it in the meeting, and can’t quite reconstruct the reasoning six months later. Agreement is not alignment.

    A plan you nodded at is a plan you’ll make an exception to. And strategies don’t fail dramatically — they drift, quietly, one reasonable exception at a time, until the gap between where you said you’d be and where you actually are is too wide to close without a serious conversation.

    The defence of a strategy happens in small moments, by people who remember why. If the reasoning lives in a document and not in a person, there’s nothing to remember.

    That’s the argument for facilitation over generation. Not that a facilitated plan is better written — often it’s worse written. It’s that a facilitated plan is owned, and ownership is the only thing that survives contact with a tempting exception.

    Why is the discomfort of the strategies phase the point?

    In the OGSM Strategy Builder, the strategies phase is the longest and designed to be the least pleasant. It generates more options than you’ll keep and then forces the cut. It insists on the “we will NOT” column. It asks what you’d have to stop, and keeps asking.

    People sometimes read that as friction badly designed. It’s friction deliberately designed.

    Good strategy always feels uncomfortable. Because it forces you to say no.

    If the whole session was comfortable, something was avoided — and it’s always the same thing: the trade-off that costs a specific person something specific. That’s the moment the plan becomes real, and exactly the moment a generative tool skips, because nothing in it requires generating.

    A strategy that cannot tell you what to say no to is not a strategy. It is a wish list dressed in a slide deck. An AI will happily produce the slide deck.

    Where must the human decide?

    Four places, and no tool should take them from you.

    The objective. An AI can draft three genuinely different bets and show what each rules out — the craft of it is in how to write a great objective. Which one is your business is not a question it can answer.

    The trade-offs. Which customer gets less attention. Which product line stops. Which market you’re not entering. These land on people, and the person who has to live with it has to be the one who says it.

    The numbers you’d be embarrassed to miss. An AI can tell you a goal is unfalsifiable. It cannot tell you whether 92% is ambitious or safe in your business.

    Who owns what. A measure without an owner is a wish, not a commitment — and only you know who will actually answer for it at the monthly review.

    Everything else — the structure, the questions, the quality checks, the format, catching activity metrics dressed as outcomes — hand it over. That work is real, it’s tedious, and machines are good at it.

    What about Doubt and Confusion — the ones no document fixes?

    Two of the Seven Cardinal Sins make the point better than I can.

    Confusion is not understanding — a strategy no one can repeat. If the people who have to deliver it can’t tell you what it is, you don’t have a strategy. You have a secret. An AI can write a clearer sentence. It cannot stand in front of your team and say it, twice a month, until it sticks. Communication isn’t a document problem; it’s a leader-showing-up problem.

    Doubt is not believing — the plan is sound, the people aren’t sold. The most expensive of the seven, and no amount of writing touches it. You cannot communicate your way out of doubt. Someone who disagrees has heard you and disagrees. Their team watches what they do, not what’s on the wall.

    A good AI process can name both, which is worth something — for most of the seven, naming is most of the cure. Not for these two. Here naming is where the job ends, and it should say so. That’s why the stress test always closes with what it cannot verify, including this: is there anyone who has to carry part of this who doesn’t believe in it?

    An AI strategy audit produces observations, not decisions.

    So what should you actually use AI for?

    Use it as a facilitator. Let it run the process, hold the standard, ask the question you’d rather not answer, catch the goal without a baseline and the strategy without an owner. Let it draft options — three real ones, not three wordings — and choose yourself.

    Don’t use it as an author. A plan you didn’t build is a plan you won’t defend, and an undefended strategy is a document with good posture and nothing behind it.

    The best strategy is still made by people who understand the business. AI helps them think more rigorously about what they already know.

    If you want that process rather than the two-minute version, the OGSM Strategy Builder is in the shop — eight phases, and it will make you choose at every one of them.

    Rock on.

  • The OGSM Strategy Builder: Build Your Whole Strategy With Claude, One Phase at a Time

    The OGSM Strategy Builder: Build Your Whole Strategy With Claude, One Phase at a Time

    You downloaded the template. You opened it on a Sunday morning with a coffee, and you got as far as the box marked Objective.

    Then you sat there.

    Not because you don’t know your business — you know it better than anyone. But because a blank box doesn’t ask you anything. It doesn’t ask why you’re doing this now. It doesn’t ask what you’d have to stop doing to make room. It doesn’t notice when you write “deliver growth” and let it stand.

    A template gives you a format. What most people actually need is a facilitator.

    That’s what we’ve built. It’s called the OGSM Strategy Builder, it’s available in the shop, and this post explains exactly what it does — and what it deliberately does not do.

    What is the OGSM Strategy Builder?

    It’s a paid Claude Skill that turns Claude into an OGSM facilitator and walks you through building a complete, execution-ready strategic plan in eight phases.

    You install it once. Then you open Claude, say something like “help me build our strategy for next year”, and it takes over: asking questions, pushing back on vague answers, drafting options for you to choose between, and saving your progress as you go. At the end you get a finished OGSM one-pager in the format you want, plus a workbook recording every decision and every option you rejected.

    It is built on the same method taught across this blog — the OGSM as described in what OGSM stands for — and on the Seven Cardinal Sins of Strategy from The Strategy Lie, the free ebook on this site.

    It does not write your strategy. I’ll come back to that, because it’s the whole design.

    What problem does it actually solve?

    The gap between a template and a process.

    We sell a $4.99 Excel template and a PowerPoint version, and they do their job well. Thousands of people have used them. But a template assumes you already know how to run the thinking — how to tell a Strategy from a Goal, how to spot an activity metric wearing an outcome metric’s coat, when to stop adding and start cutting.

    Most people don’t. Not because they’re not smart enough, but because nobody ever showed them. And so the classic thing happens: the plan gets written, the boxes get filled, and three months later nobody can remember what was in it. The plan isn’t bad. The process behind it never happened.

    The other half of the problem is that a facilitator is expensive. A good strategy consultant to run a two-day session costs more than most small businesses will ever spend on strategy. So the choice has been: a blank template, or a five-figure invoice.

    This sits in between. It’s the process, not just the page.

    What is a Claude Skill, and do I need to be technical?

    No. A Skill is a folder of instructions you add to your Claude account — Claude.ai, Claude Code or Cowork. Once it’s installed, Claude reads it and follows it whenever the topic comes up. You install it once, the way you’d install an app, and after that you just talk to Claude normally.

    There’s no coding, no API key, no subscription to anything except Claude itself. If you can download a file and drag it into a browser window, you can install this.

    What happens across the eight phases?

    The order matters. OGSM works left to right, and each element is built on the one before it. Skip a phase and the phase after it inherits the gap.

    Phase 0 — Set-up and Diagnosis

    Scope, time horizon (a 3–5 year strategic plan and a 1-year operating plan are different animals), and who has to agree. Then two diagnostics: the Five-Answer Test — ask five of your leaders separately what the strategy is and count how many different answers you get — and the Seven Sins self-diagnosis. It finishes by asking you to list everything the business currently has in flight. That list comes back to bite in Phase 5, which is the point.

    Phase 1 — Reality

    Key figures first, then a SWOT built by conversation rather than form-filling — the approach in how to do a SWOT right. Where your situation warrants it, it offers deeper analysis: PESTEL, market trends, Porter’s Generic Strategies, Five Forces, the 5P marketing mix. Where it doesn’t, it doesn’t offer them. Nobody needs a Five Forces analysis to decide whether to hire a second van.

    Phase 2 — Objective

    One qualitative, what-by-how statement. It drafts three genuinely different options — different bets, not different wordings — shows you what each one commits you to and what each one rules out, and makes you pick. Then it sharpens the one you picked and runs it through the tests in how to write a great objective. Expect to spend real time here. This is the sentence everything else hangs from.

    Phase 3 — Goals

    Three to five SMART goals, each with a baseline, at least one financial, and coverage of both halves of your objective — the “what” and the “how”. Then the gate: if we achieve exactly these goals and nothing else, have we succeeded? It’s the most useful question in the method and it’s in how to write SMART goals for your OGSM.

    Phase 4 — Strategies

    Three to five what-by-how choices, each with a named owner. Then the We WILL / We will NOT list, which is the exercise that turns a set of intentions into a decision. This is the uncomfortable phase, and if it isn’t uncomfortable it hasn’t worked.

    Phase 5 — Measures

    Per strategy, two structurally different things kept explicitly apart: a Dashboard of 2–4 KPIs, each with baseline, target, frequency and a data owner, at least one leading and one lagging — and an Action Plan of 2–3 initiatives, each with a caretaker and dates. Then the capacity conversation: your Phase 0 workload list comes back and every item gets sorted into continues, paused or stopped. If everything stays, you execute nothing. The full method is in the complete guide to OGSM Measures.

    Phase 6 — Stress Test

    The finished draft is run against the quality rules and the seven failure modes, and reported back in three parts: what holds, what it would challenge, and what it cannot verify.

    Phase 7 — Deliver and Cascade

    The one-pager in your chosen formats, plus cascade guidance (a higher-level Measure becomes a lower-level Goal — see how to cascade OGSM), a communication plan, and the review calendar with actual dates in it. Not “quarterly, we’ll find dates”. Dates.

    Phase 8 — Review (and this one repeats)

    The plan is built. Now comes the part that decides whether any of it mattered.

    Before each monthly or quarterly review, you bring the workbook back. The skill walks the plan strategy by strategy, updates the numbers and statuses with whatever you know, works out whether each goal is actually on the path you set — not just whether it moved — and checks the question almost nobody asks out loud: has anything on your “we will not” list quietly started happening again?

    That last check is the one that earns its keep. Strategies rarely get reversed in a meeting. They get reversed one exception at a time, and nobody notices until the trade-off that made the plan real has been eroded entirely.

    You come out with a prepared agenda, at-risk items first, and the two or three things that genuinely need a decision rather than a status update. Afterwards you come back, say what was decided, and it goes into the workbook.

    What do you get at the end?

    Three things.

    The OGSM one-pager, in HTML, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF — you pick, and most people take at least two. HTML is the living version you share by link. Excel is the one your OGSM caretaker updates each month. PowerPoint is what you present. PDF is what you print and pin up.

    The Strategy Workbook, which captures the reasoning: the options you rejected and why, the trade-offs, the accepted risks. This is more valuable than it sounds. At your first review, when someone asks “why did we decide that?”, the answer is written down.

    A cascade and communication pack — who hears what, how, when, and from whom, plus the review calendar.

    The skill also ships two scripts. One generates the four output formats. The other validates any plan against the OGSM rules: counts, what-by-how form, missing owners, targets without baselines, activity metrics masquerading as outcomes, and an empty “will not” list. You can run that validator against a plan you wrote years ago, on your own, without doing any of the rest.

    What happens if you have to stop halfway?

    You stop.

    The skill writes your progress to a workbook file at the end of every phase and hands it to you. Stop after Phase 2 on a Tuesday, come back three weeks later, hand the file back, and it tells you in two sentences where you left off and carries on. Nothing gets redone.

    This is deliberate. A strategy built over four evenings is worth more than one rushed in an afternoon, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a plan that was really just a long meeting.

    What does the stress test actually check — and what can’t it check?

    The mechanical checks are easy and mostly automated: goal counts, missing baselines, strategies without owners, initiatives that are really operational routines, vanity metrics.

    The judgement checks are the interesting ones. Would five people read this page the same way? Could someone who joined three weeks ago say what the business is trying to do? Swap in your main competitor’s name — does the plan still read as sensible? If yes, you haven’t chosen anything. Is there anything in this plan that costs someone something specific? Do the strategies plausibly deliver the goals, or is the goal 28% growth against three efficiency initiatives?

    And then the part I insisted on: what it cannot verify.

    Every stress test ends with a section naming the assumptions it has taken on trust — your market size, a competitor’s intent, your team’s real capacity, whether the person who has to carry Strategy 3 actually believes in it. It has read everything and lived none of it. Those are the things you check before the plan goes live.

    An AI strategy review produces observations, not decisions. A tool that pretends otherwise is selling you confidence you haven’t earned.

    Who is this for — and who is it not for?

    It’s for you if: you run or lead a business and need a real plan; you’ve tried a template and stalled; you have a strategy nobody can repeat; you’re a functional leader who has to build a plan that connects upward; you want a sparring partner who won’t agree with you to keep the peace. It works for a five-person firm and for a division of four hundred — see OGSM for small business if you’re at the smaller end.

    It’s not for you if you want a plan written for you in two minutes. It will refuse. It will draft options and make you choose, and it will ask you what you’re going to stop doing, and it will keep asking until you answer. If that sounds like more work than you were hoping for — it is. That’s not a bug, and post three in this series explains why at length.

    It also won’t do the political work. If your real problem is that two directors disagree and everyone knows it, no document fixes that. It will name it. It can’t settle it.

    The honest summary

    This is a facilitator, not an oracle. It brings the method, the discipline, the questions and the standard. You bring the business, the judgement and the decisions.

    Your strategy doesn’t need to be complex to be good. It needs to be clear, owned, and reviewed. This is a structured way to get there in an afternoon or four evenings, instead of another year of meaning to.

    Ready to stop staring at the blank Objective box? The OGSM Strategy Builder is available now in the shop — install it once, and build your strategy the next time you can give it an afternoon.

    Founding price — $49 until 31 October 2026. After that it goes to $99, and stays there. Founding customers keep every future update at no extra cost, including the new phases and worked examples already planned for the next version.

    For scale: one facilitated strategy session starts at around $2,000, and five seats of the cheapest OGSM software is roughly €480 a year. This is $49, once.

    Rock on.

  • The AI Strategy Audit: How to Use AI Tools to Keep Your OGSM on Track

    The AI Strategy Audit: How to Use AI Tools to Keep Your OGSM on Track

    You built a solid OGSM. You ran the launch meeting, shared the document, set a review cadence. And then life took over, and six weeks later you’re not sure which Goals are on track, which Measures haven’t been updated, and whether the strategy you committed to is still the right one.

    An AI strategy audit uses AI tools — Claude, ChatGPT, or similar — to systematically review your OGSM: flagging stale Measures, testing whether your Goals are still realistic, stress-testing your Strategies against current conditions, and generating specific questions for your next review meeting. A thorough AI audit takes 30 minutes and surfaces issues a standard review often misses.

    Here’s how to run one — and the exact prompts to use.

    Why AI Makes a Good Strategy Auditor

    AI tools don’t have the same blind spots you do. When you review your own OGSM, you see it through the lens of what you know, what you’re hoping for, and what feels uncomfortable to confront. An AI tool has none of those filters. Ask it the right questions, and it will push back on your assumptions with the consistency of a very patient, very well-read advisor who has no stake in the outcome.

    The key is knowing what to ask. Used poorly, AI just produces generic strategy advice. Used with the right prompts and your actual OGSM data, it becomes a genuinely useful thinking partner for the review process.

    What You Need Before You Start

    Before running an AI strategy audit, gather:

    • Your current OGSM document (or a typed summary of Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures with current RAG status)
    • Any recent performance data relevant to your Goals (revenue figures, traffic numbers, customer counts — whatever your Goals track)
    • The date your OGSM was last formally reviewed

    You don’t need to share the full document at once. The prompts below are designed to work section by section.

    The Five-Part AI Strategy Audit

    Part 1: Objective Clarity Test

    Paste your Objective into the AI tool and use this prompt:

    “Here is our strategic Objective: [paste Objective]. Please assess this against three criteria: (1) Is it specific enough to guide real decisions, or is it too vague? (2) Does it suggest a clear timeframe? (3) Would someone outside our organisation understand what we’re trying to achieve? Please flag any weaknesses and suggest a sharper version if needed.”

    A well-written Objective should pass all three. If the AI struggles to understand what you’re aiming for, your team probably does too.

    Part 2: Goal Integrity Check

    Paste each Goal (with baseline and target) and use this prompt:

    “Here are our strategic Goals: [paste Goals with baselines and targets]. Please assess each one against the SMART criteria — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Flag any Goals that are missing elements, and identify any that appear too safe (unlikely to stretch the team) or too ambitious (unrealistic without a step-change in approach).”

    Ask a follow-up: “Given these Goals, what would need to be true about our business for us to achieve all of them simultaneously? Are there any that might conflict with each other?”

    This second question often surfaces tensions the planning process missed — for example, a Goal to grow volume while simultaneously improving margin, without a Strategy that explicitly addresses the trade-off.

    Part 3: Strategy Stress Test

    Paste your Strategies and use this prompt:

    “Here are the Strategies we have committed to this year: [paste Strategies]. For each one, please: (1) Identify the key assumption it relies on. (2) Describe what would have to be true in the market for this Strategy to succeed. (3) Flag any Strategy where the assumption seems weak or where an alternative approach might be more effective.”

    You can also ask: “Are there any obvious strategic options we appear not to have considered, given our Objective and Goals?”

    This prompt works especially well when you share some context about your market or competitive situation. The more specific you are, the more useful the output.

    Part 4: Measures Audit

    Paste your Measures and use this prompt:

    “Here are the Measures we are tracking: [paste Measures with targets and current status]. Please assess each one and tell me: (1) Is this a leading indicator (predicts future Goal performance) or a lagging indicator (reports past results)? (2) Does this Measure have a plausible causal connection to the Goal it’s meant to support? (3) Are there any Measures that appear to be output metrics rather than outcome metrics?”

    Then ask: “If all of these Measures were consistently green, which of our Goals would you be most confident will be achieved — and which Goals do you think would still be at risk? Why?”

    This last question tests whether your Measures actually cover your Goals — a common gap in OGSM design.

    Part 5: Review Meeting Preparation

    Once you’ve completed the first four parts, use this prompt to prepare your next strategy review:

    “Based on everything we’ve discussed about our OGSM — our Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures — please generate: (1) The five most important questions our leadership team should discuss at our next strategy review. (2) The two or three areas where you think we are most at risk of being off track. (3) One provocation — a question designed to challenge a core assumption we might not be examining.”

    The provocation question is often the most valuable output. Strategy teams have a tendency to examine tactics while leaving core assumptions unquestioned. A good provocation makes the meeting more honest.

    How to Use the Output

    An AI strategy audit produces observations, not decisions. The output gives you better questions to take into the review meeting, not answers to replace the meeting.

    Treat it as pre-work. Share the AI audit output with your leadership team 24 hours before the review. Ask them to come prepared to discuss the two or three risks the audit flagged. This shifts the meeting from information-sharing to genuine strategic dialogue.

    Running the Audit Quarterly

    The AI strategy audit works best as a quarterly habit — done two or three days before each major strategy review. It takes about 30 minutes to run, and the discipline of preparing your OGSM data to share with the AI tool is itself valuable: it forces you to update the document before the review rather than improvising status in the meeting.

    You can also run a lighter version monthly — just Part 4 (the Measures audit) — to catch any Measures that are drifting without being addressed.

    What AI Can’t Do

    AI tools are useful strategy thinking partners. They are not strategy consultants, and they’re not a substitute for genuine organisational knowledge.

    AI doesn’t know your specific market dynamics, your team’s actual capacity, or the political realities that shape what’s truly possible in your organisation. The audit questions are most useful when you’re specific about context — “we operate in a market where…” or “our main constraint is…” — and when you treat the output as input to human judgment rather than a replacement for it.

    The best strategy is still made by people who understand the business. AI helps them think more rigorously about what they already know.

    Ready to Audit Your Strategy?

    If you want to run an AI strategy audit on your OGSM, the first thing you need is an OGSM that’s properly structured — with clear Goals, connected Strategies, and trackable Measures. The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel give you that structure from the start, so when you bring the AI into the review process, you’re working from a solid foundation rather than trying to retrofit one.

    And if you would rather not run the audit prompt by prompt, the OGSM Strategy Builder has both the stress test and the review built in as phases: it runs the mechanical checks, challenges the judgement calls, says plainly what it cannot verify, and prepares your review agenda with the at-risk items first. More on how it works.

  • Is Your Strategy Off Track? 10 Warning Signs and How to Fix Them

    Is Your Strategy Off Track? 10 Warning Signs and How to Fix Them

    Strategies don’t usually fail dramatically. They drift — quietly, gradually, until the gap between where you said you’d be and where you actually are is too wide to close without a serious conversation.

    Your strategy is off track if two or more of these warning signs are present: review meetings focus on activity rather than results, Goals haven’t been updated in months, your team can’t articulate the strategy in a sentence, you keep adding initiatives without removing others, or your Measures are consistently green while your Goals are red. Each sign points to a specific fix.

    Here are ten warning signs to look for — and what to do about each one.

    1. Your Review Meetings Have Become Status Updates

    If strategy reviews are mostly slide decks of “what we did last month” rather than “are we on track and what needs to change,” your review process has become a reporting exercise rather than a decision-making one.

    The fix: Restructure your next meeting around questions, not slides. Start with: “Which Measures are amber or red, and why?” Require anyone presenting a Measure to also propose an action.

    2. Nobody Can Summarise the Strategy in One Sentence

    Ask three people in your organisation to describe the strategy. If you get three different answers — or three blank looks — the strategy hasn’t landed.

    A strategy that can’t be summarised isn’t a strategy. It’s a planning document.

    The fix: Write a single strategy sentence that everyone at leadership level agrees on. Something like: “We are focusing on [target market] with [key approach] in order to [Objective].” Test it until it’s short enough to remember and specific enough to actually guide decisions.

    3. Your Measures Are Green but Your Goals Are Red

    This is one of the most common — and most dangerous — patterns in strategy reviews. Your leading indicators look healthy, but your lagging outcomes are not improving. This means either your Measures aren’t actually measuring what matters, or the connection between your Strategies and your Goals is weaker than you thought.

    The fix: Audit the connection between each Measure and the Goal it supposedly predicts. Are they genuinely linked? If a Measure has been green for three months and the related Goal hasn’t moved, that Measure isn’t a leading indicator — it’s a comfort metric. Replace it.

    4. You Keep Adding Priorities Without Removing Anything

    Every time a new idea or external pressure arrives, it gets added to the strategy. Nothing ever gets removed. The result is a list of twelve “priorities” and a team that quietly does whatever it was already doing.

    The fix: Apply a simple rule: for every new initiative added to the strategy, one existing initiative must be explicitly paused or removed. This forces real prioritisation rather than the illusion of it.

    5. Your Strategies Haven’t Changed, Even Though the Market Has

    A strategy that made sense in January may not make sense in October. If the external environment has shifted — new competition, changing customer behaviour, a technology disruption — and your Strategies look exactly the same as they did at the start of the year, either you’ve genuinely assessed the situation and decided to stay the course, or you haven’t been paying attention.

    The fix: At each quarterly review, spend ten minutes explicitly asking: “What has changed in our environment since we set this strategy? Does our approach still make sense?” This isn’t about rewriting the strategy every quarter — it’s about confirming that the strategy remains valid.

    6. The OGSM Hasn’t Been Updated Since It Was Created

    If your OGSM document looks exactly like it did on the day you built it — same numbers, same RAG status, no updates — it’s become a wall decoration rather than a working tool.

    A living OGSM changes at every review. Status gets updated. Actions get added. Occasionally a Strategy changes. If none of that is happening, the document isn’t being used.

    The fix: Assign a single owner for the OGSM document. That person is responsible for updating it after every review meeting and circulating the updated version within 48 hours.

    7. Your Team Doesn’t Know How Their Work Connects to the Strategy

    If individual contributors or team leaders can’t explain how their work connects to the overall Objective and Goals, the strategy isn’t guiding day-to-day priorities. It’s operating in parallel to the real work.

    The fix: This is a cascade problem. Each team should have a clear line of sight from their tasks to the company’s Goals. If that connection doesn’t exist, either build it through a cascade OGSM or simplify the strategy until the connection becomes obvious.

    8. You’re Consistently Hitting Targets That Require No Change

    If every Goal comes in at exactly 100% every quarter with no significant course corrections, one of two things is true: either your execution is genuinely exceptional, or your targets aren’t stretching enough to drive growth.

    Comfortable targets feel good. They also tend to correlate with stagnant results.

    The fix: Revisit your Goal-setting methodology. A well-set Goal should require your team to do things differently, not just more of the same. If you’ve hit your revenue Goal every year for five years without fundamentally changing your approach, it’s probably time to raise the bar.

    9. Ownership of Goals and Strategies Is Unclear

    In a review meeting, you discuss a red Goal and nobody in the room feels specifically responsible for fixing it. Everyone is vaguely accountable. Nobody is actually accountable.

    The fix: Every Goal and every Strategy on your OGSM should have a single named owner — not a team, not a department, a person. That person presents the status at every review and proposes actions when it’s off track. Diffuse ownership is how strategies die quietly.

    10. You’re Measuring Outputs Instead of Outcomes

    “We published fifteen articles this quarter.” “We ran twelve sales calls.” “We delivered the training programme.” These are outputs — things you did. Outcomes are what changed as a result: traffic increased, pipeline grew, team capability improved.

    A strategy tracked only by outputs is a strategy that can look busy while going nowhere.

    The fix: For every Measure on your OGSM, ask: “Does this tell us about what we did, or about what changed?” Wherever possible, replace output Measures with outcome Measures. “Articles published” becomes “organic sessions generated.” “Sales calls made” becomes “qualified meetings booked.”

    What to Do If Several Signs Are Present

    One warning sign is a flag. Three or more is a signal that your strategy process needs a reset, not just a tune-up.

    A reset doesn’t mean scrapping the strategy. It usually means running a one-day strategy health check — bringing the leadership team together to honestly assess the OGSM against each of these warning signs, and agreeing on three specific changes to make within the next 30 days.

    It also means revisiting your review cadence and format. If the process isn’t working, the problem is usually the structure of the meeting, not the people in it. And it means reassigning ownership explicitly — if accountability has drifted, it needs to be re-established directly, not hinted at.

    The goal isn’t a perfect strategy. It’s a strategy that’s genuinely guiding decisions, being reviewed, and adapting to what you learn.

    A Tool That Makes Off-Track Visible

    One reason strategies drift unnoticed is that the OGSM isn’t in a format that makes status easy to see at a glance. When your Goals and Measures are in a clearly structured, RAG-coded template, it’s much harder to ignore what’s red.

    The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel are designed to make status visible — so the conversation at your next review starts with the right question: “Why is this red, and what are we going to do about it?”

  • How to Cascade Your OGSM Across Your Organisation

    How to Cascade Your OGSM Across Your Organisation

    A strategy that only lives at the top of the organisation isn’t really a strategy — it’s a set of senior leadership intentions that nobody else acts on.

    Cascading your OGSM means translating the company-level Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures into department-level OGSMs that support the parent plan. Each department keeps the same Objective, then builds its own Goals, Strategies, and Measures that contribute directly to the company’s. Done well, every team member can trace their work back to the organisation’s direction.

    Here’s how to cascade without losing alignment — or your team’s sanity.

    Why Cascading Matters

    Most strategy failures aren’t failures of planning. They’re failures of translation. The executive team agrees on an excellent strategy, it gets presented, and then people go back to their desks and continue doing more or less what they were already doing.

    The OGSM cascade solves this by creating a direct line of sight between the company’s Objective and every team’s day-to-day work. When someone in operations can look at their team’s OGSM and see exactly how it connects to the company-level Goals, strategy stops being something that happens in boardrooms and starts being something that shapes how people prioritise their week.

    The Structure of a Cascade

    Think of it as a tree:

    Level 1 — Company OGSM: The overall Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures for the organisation.

    Level 2 — Division or Function OGSMs: HR, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Operations each build their own OGSM. Same Objective. Different Goals and Strategies that reflect what their function contributes.

    Level 3 — Team or Project OGSMs (optional): In larger organisations, individual teams or major projects may have their own sub-OGSMs cascaded from the division level.

    The cascade doesn’t require all three levels. Many organisations work well with just two. What matters is that every level’s Goals visibly contribute to the level above it.

    How to Build the Cascade

    Step 1: Lock the Company OGSM First

    Don’t start building department OGSMs until the company-level plan is finalised. This sounds obvious, but cascading before the top-level plan is locked leads to department Goals that point in slightly different directions.

    The company OGSM is the fixed point. Everything below it aligns to it — not the other way around.

    Step 2: Identify Each Department’s Contribution

    For each department, ask: which company Goals does this function directly influence?

    Marketing influences awareness, traffic, and pipeline Goals. Sales influences revenue and customer acquisition Goals. Operations may influence quality, retention, and cost Goals. HR influences capability and culture Goals that underpin almost everything else.

    A department doesn’t need to contribute to every company Goal — just the ones where it genuinely has influence. A cascaded OGSM with three relevant Goals is better than one with six watered-down contributions.

    Step 3: Write the Department Goals

    Department Goals should be outcomes that directly feed the company-level Goals above them.

    If the company Goal is “Grow annual recurring revenue from €5M to €8M by December 2026,” the Sales department Goal might be “Close €2.4M in new ARR from inbound leads by December 2026.” The Marketing department Goal might be “Generate 1,200 qualified leads for the sales team by year-end.”

    Both contribute to the same company Goal. Neither duplicates the other.

    Step 4: Define Department Strategies

    Department Strategies are the specific choices that department will make to hit their Goals. These are usually more operational and specific than the company-level Strategies.

    Company Strategy: “Invest in content marketing to drive inbound demand.”

    Marketing’s Strategy (cascaded): “Publish two SEO-targeted articles per week; run monthly LinkedIn campaigns to drive article traffic; build a lead magnet to convert organic visitors.”

    Step 5: Set Department Measures

    Department Measures track progress on the department’s Strategies — and should be reviewed at the same cadence as company Measures (usually monthly).

    The head of the department owns the department OGSM review. The company-level review draws from these department inputs.

    Making the Cascade Visible

    One of the most powerful things you can do with a cascade is make the connections visible — literally. In your OGSM template, cross-reference department Goals back to the company Goal they support.

    For example, in the Marketing OGSM, next to each Goal, note the company Goal it feeds: “Feeds: Company Goal 2 — Revenue €8M.” This keeps the alignment explicit rather than assumed, and it gives every review a natural “so what” test: if we hit this department Goal, which company Goal moves?

    Common Cascade Mistakes

    Building department OGSMs in silos. If departments build their own OGSMs without referencing the company-level plan, you get local optimisation rather than aligned execution. Heads of department should build their plans in a facilitated session, ideally with the company OGSM on the wall.

    Allowing too much divergence. Some flexibility in department-level Goals is fine. But if a department’s Goals don’t clearly contribute to any company Goal, they’re not cascading — they’re operating a separate strategy.

    Treating the cascade as a one-time exercise. The cascade is a living system. When the company OGSM changes mid-year because of market conditions, the department OGSMs need to update too. Build in a review trigger: whenever the company-level plan changes significantly, review department plans within the following month.

    Cascading too deep too soon. For most organisations, two levels is enough. A third level of team-level OGSMs makes sense only when teams are large and distinct enough to genuinely need their own planning. Don’t create complexity for its own sake.

    Cascade in a Small Business

    Cascading isn’t only for large organisations. Even a three-person business benefits from making the connection explicit between the business-level strategy and each person’s role.

    If your business OGSM has a Goal of growing revenue 40% this year, a simple cascade might mean:

    • Person A’s individual plan focuses on sales and client relationships.
    • Person B’s plan focuses on delivery quality and retention.
    • Person C’s plan focuses on operations and cost efficiency.

    Each person knows exactly how their work contributes to the shared Goal, and the monthly review becomes a two-level check: are we hitting our individual Measures, and is that moving the business Goal?

    The Right Format for a Cascade

    Cascading works best when all levels use the same template format. If the company OGSM is in PowerPoint, department OGSMs should be in the same template. If it’s in Excel, same. Consistency of format makes it easy to review across levels and keeps the visual alignment clear.

    The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel are built for exactly this — you can use the same template at company and department level, adjust the Goals and Measures for each, and keep the whole cascade on the same page layout. That consistency makes cascade reviews much faster and alignment much more visible.

  • How to Use OGSM for a 90-Day Sprint Plan

    How to Use OGSM for a 90-Day Sprint Plan

    Annual strategies are great on paper. The problem is that most people don’t look at them again until it’s too late to change anything.

    To use OGSM for a 90-day sprint plan, take your annual Objective and Goals and break them into a focused sub-OGSM for the quarter: keep the Objective, select the one or two Goals most critical this quarter, define the Strategies you’ll run in this period only, and set Measures with 90-day targets. Review progress every two weeks.

    The 90-day OGSM sits inside your annual strategy, not instead of it. Here’s how to build one that actually works.

    Why 90 Days Is the Right Unit for Execution

    A year is long enough to lose focus, change direction, and still feel like you have time. A week is too short to see any meaningful movement on strategic priorities. Ninety days is the sweet spot — long enough to make real progress, short enough to keep urgency high.

    The 90-day sprint model works just as well with OGSM — and arguably better, because OGSM naturally scales from annual to quarterly without requiring a different framework.

    The Difference Between an Annual OGSM and a 90-Day OGSM

    Your annual OGSM sets the year’s direction. Your 90-day OGSM answers: what do we actually work on in the next three months to move toward that direction?

    Annual OGSM — 3–5 Goals, multiple Strategies, Measures tracked monthly or quarterly.

    90-Day OGSM — 1–2 Goals (the ones where you need the most progress this quarter), 2–3 Strategies (the specific campaigns or initiatives running right now), Measures tracked weekly or bi-weekly.

    You’re not rebuilding your strategy every 90 days. You’re focusing it.

    How to Build Your 90-Day OGSM

    Step 1: Start With Your Annual Objective

    Your 90-day Objective is the same as your annual Objective. Don’t rewrite it. The purpose of the sprint is to make progress toward the annual direction — you don’t need a new destination every quarter.

    If your annual Objective is “Become the go-to provider of OGSM training for European mid-market businesses,” that’s also your 90-day Objective. The sprint just defines what “progress” means for this quarter.

    Step 2: Select Your 90-Day Focus Goals

    Look at your annual Goals and ask: which one or two of these are most important to make progress on right now?

    In Q1, you might focus on building awareness and pipeline. In Q3, you might focus on revenue conversion and retention. Not all Goals are equally urgent in all quarters.

    Choose a maximum of two Goals for the sprint. For each, set a 90-day sub-target — a milestone rather than the full-year figure.

    For example, if your annual Goal is “Grow organic website traffic from 4,000 to 10,000 monthly sessions by December,” your Q2 sub-target might be “Reach 6,500 monthly sessions by 30 June.”

    Step 3: Define Your Strategies for This Quarter

    Your 90-day Strategies are the specific initiatives you’ll run during this sprint. Be more specific here than in your annual OGSM.

    Annual Strategy: “Build thought-leadership content to drive inbound traffic.”

    90-Day Strategy: “Publish eight SEO-optimised blog articles targeting OGSM search terms; promote each via LinkedIn and email list.”

    The more specific your 90-day Strategies, the easier it is to assign work and track progress.

    Step 4: Set Weekly or Bi-Weekly Measures

    Your 90-day Measures should update every one to two weeks — not monthly. At 90 days, you don’t have time for monthly check-ins to reveal you’re off-track.

    For a content-focused sprint, your Measures might be:

    • Articles published per week: target 2
    • LinkedIn post reach per article: target 800 impressions
    • Email open rate for content newsletter: target 35%
    • Organic sessions: tracking weekly against the 6,500 target

    These aren’t big strategic questions — they’re operational metrics that tell you whether the engine is running. If one drops, you address it quickly rather than discovering the problem at month three.

    Step 5: Review Every Two Weeks

    Block a 30–45 minute review every two weeks for the duration of the sprint. Use the same structure as a full strategy review: Measures first, Goals second, actions third.

    At the end of the 90 days, run a proper sprint retrospective: what worked, what didn’t, and what should inform next quarter’s sprint plan.

    A 90-Day OGSM Example

    Objective: Become the go-to provider of OGSM templates and training for European business strategists.

    90-Day Focus Goals (Q2):

    • Grow organic monthly website traffic to 6,500 sessions by 30 June (from 4,000).
    • Generate €8,000 in template sales by 30 June (from €4,500 in Q1).

    90-Day Strategies:

    • Publish eight SEO-targeted articles focused on OGSM search terms.
    • Run a LinkedIn content series (three posts per week) highlighting OGSM use cases.
    • Launch a promotional campaign to the email list for the Excel template.

    Measures (bi-weekly):

    • Articles published: target 1 per week
    • LinkedIn engagement rate: target 4%+
    • Email click-through rate: target 3%+
    • Weekly organic sessions: tracking toward 6,500 by end of June
    • Weekly shop revenue: tracking toward €8,000 by end of June

    When to Use a 90-Day OGSM

    A 90-day sprint plan works best when:

    You need to rebuild momentum. If a strategy has been dormant or underdelivering, a focused 90-day sprint with a clear end date is better than a vague renewal of commitment to the annual plan.

    You’re in a period of rapid change. If market conditions are shifting fast, a 90-day planning horizon keeps you responsive without abandoning strategic direction.

    Your team needs focus. Annual strategies can feel overwhelming. A 90-day sprint with two goals and three strategies gives people something concrete to work toward.

    You’re testing a new Strategy. If you want to know whether a new approach works before committing to it for the year, run it as a 90-day experiment with clear Measures.

    What to Avoid

    Treating every quarter as a blank slate. Your annual OGSM is the constant. Sprint plans should build on each other, not restart the strategy from scratch every 90 days.

    Adding too many Goals. If you’re trying to make significant progress on four or five Goals in 90 days, you’ll make marginal progress on all of them. Pick two, go deep.

    Setting Measures that update monthly. Monthly Measures in a 90-day sprint leave you with only three data points. Weekly or bi-weekly is the right cadence.

    The Template Makes It Simple

    The cleanest way to run a 90-day OGSM sprint is with a template that lets you work at both levels — annual and quarterly — without juggling two separate documents. The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel are structured so you can use the same layout for your annual plan and your quarterly sprint, keeping your strategic logic consistent while your operational focus sharpens every 90 days.

  • How to Write SMART Goals for Your OGSM (With Examples)

    How to Write SMART Goals for Your OGSM (With Examples)

    Setting goals is easy. Setting goals that actually tell you whether your strategy is working is a different skill entirely.

    SMART goals for your OGSM are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound targets that sit directly below your Objective and above your Strategies. A well-written OGSM Goal names exactly what you will achieve, by how much, and by when — leaving no room for ambiguity when it comes time to review.

    This article walks you through how to write them well, with examples from both corporate and small business contexts.

    What Makes a Goal “SMART” in an OGSM Context

    The SMART framework predates OGSM, but the two were made for each other. In an OGSM, Goals are the layer that translates your Objective from aspiration into accountability. They answer the question: how will we know if we’ve succeeded?

    Here’s what each element means in practice when you’re building an OGSM:

    Specific — The goal defines a particular outcome, not a direction. “Grow revenue” is not specific. “Grow recurring revenue from existing customers” is specific.

    Measurable — The goal includes a number you can track. Without a number, you cannot review it. “Improve customer satisfaction” is not measurable. “Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 45 or above” is measurable.

    Achievable — The goal stretches the team without breaking it. An unachievable goal stops being motivating somewhere around week three. A good test: have you achieved something in this range before, and what would need to change to do it again?

    Relevant — The goal connects directly to the Objective. If your Objective is to become the preferred provider in your region, a goal about global market share is probably off-track.

    Time-bound — The goal has a deadline. For OGSM purposes, this is usually the end of the year, but quarterly milestones help.

    The Structure of a Well-Written OGSM Goal

    A useful template for writing OGSM Goals:

    [Verb] [metric] from [current baseline] to [target] by [date].

    For example:

    • Increase annual recurring revenue from €1.2M to €1.8M by 31 December 2026.
    • Reduce customer churn rate from 8% to 5% by Q4 2026.
    • Grow organic website traffic from 4,000 to 10,000 monthly sessions by year-end.

    Each of these passes the SMART test: you can measure it, you know when you’re done, and there’s no ambiguity in the review meeting.

    How Many Goals Should an OGSM Have?

    Most OGSMs work best with three to five Goals. Fewer than three and you risk missing important dimensions of your strategy. More than five and attention gets diluted.

    Think of your Goals as covering the key dimensions of your Objective. A business with a growth Objective might have Goals covering revenue, customer acquisition, customer retention, and market position. A non-profit with a community-impact Objective might have Goals around beneficiaries reached, programme delivery, and fundraising.

    The rule: every Goal should be important enough that failing to hit it would make your Objective feel unachieved.

    OGSM Goal Examples by Context

    Corporate Strategy

    Objective: Become the market leader in sustainable packaging in Northern Europe by 2027.

    Goals:

    • Increase market share in sustainable packaging from 12% to 20% in Northern Europe by December 2026.
    • Grow revenue from sustainable product lines from €8M to €14M by December 2026.
    • Achieve a customer retention rate of 90% across key accounts by Q4 2026.
    • Launch two new certified sustainable products to market by June 2026.

    Small Business

    Objective: Build a profitable consulting practice focused on strategy for mid-sized businesses.

    Goals:

    • Generate €180,000 in consulting revenue by December 2026 (baseline: €95,000).
    • Secure eight recurring retainer clients by Q3 2026 (baseline: three).
    • Achieve a client referral rate of 50% of new business by year-end.
    • Publish 24 articles or resources that drive inbound leads by December 2026.

    Non-Profit

    Objective: Expand access to financial literacy education in underserved communities.

    Goals:

    • Reach 5,000 programme participants by December 2026 (baseline: 2,200).
    • Deliver programmes in at least six new partner schools by Q3 2026.
    • Raise €320,000 in restricted funding for programme delivery by year-end.

    Common Mistakes When Writing OGSM Goals

    Confusing Goals with Strategies. A Goal is an outcome. A Strategy is a choice about how to achieve it. “Launch a digital marketing campaign” is a Strategy, not a Goal. The Goal is the traffic or lead volume you expect that campaign to produce.

    Writing aspirations instead of targets. “Be the best in our market” is an aspiration. It tells you nothing in a review meeting. The Goal version is: “Achieve an NPS of 60+ among enterprise customers by December 2026.”

    Setting too many Goals. Seven or eight goals fragment focus. If everything is a priority, nothing is. Cut until you’re left with the goals that genuinely define success.

    Ignoring the baseline. A goal without a baseline is hard to contextualise. “Grow revenue by 30%” sounds ambitious or conservative depending on whether you’re starting at €200K or €2M. Always state where you’re starting from.

    Making Goals too safe. A Goal that you’re 100% certain you’ll hit isn’t motivating anyone. Aim for a target that requires some stretch — something you believe is achievable if your Strategies work.

    Connecting Goals to Measures

    In an OGSM, Goals sit alongside Measures — but they’re different things. Goals are your lagging indicators: the outcomes you’re measuring at the end of a period. Measures are your leading indicators: the early signals that tell you whether you’re on track to hit those Goals.

    If your Goal is to grow organic website traffic to 10,000 monthly sessions, your related Measures might include: number of new articles published per month, average keyword ranking position for target terms, and backlinks acquired. These Measures tell you mid-year whether you’re heading toward the Goal — without waiting until December to find out.

    Getting this distinction right is what makes your OGSM reviewable month to month, not just at year-end.

    A Template That Does the Heavy Lifting

    Writing SMART Goals gets easier when you’re working in a structure designed for it. The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel both include pre-built sections for Goals with space for baselines, targets, and RAG status — so your Goals are automatically set up for review. If you’re starting from scratch or want to tighten up an existing OGSM, they’re worth the hour it takes to populate them properly.

  • How to Run an OGSM Strategy Review Meeting That Actually Moves the Needle

    How to Run an OGSM Strategy Review Meeting That Actually Moves the Needle

    Most strategy review meetings end with a slide deck nobody looks at again and a vague promise to “do better next quarter.”

    An effective OGSM strategy review meeting follows a fixed agenda: review your measures first, diagnose why goals are on or off track, agree on one to three concrete actions, and assign ownership before anyone leaves the room. Done monthly or quarterly, a 60–90 minute meeting is enough to keep a team aligned and a strategy alive.

    The difference between a review that drives change and one that just takes up calendar space is structure. Here’s exactly how to run it.

    Why Most Strategy Reviews Fail

    Strategy reviews fail for predictable reasons. The meeting is too long, too unfocused, or too comfortable. Teams report on what happened without asking why it happened — and leave without agreeing on what to do differently.

    The OGSM framework actually makes this easier to fix. Because OGSM separates your Objective (direction), Goals (measurable targets), Strategies (choices), and Measures (leading indicators), you always have a clear agenda. You’re not reviewing a vague “progress update.” You’re reviewing specific numbers against specific targets and asking specific questions.

    Who Should Be in the Room

    Keep it small. A strategy review is not an all-hands or a status report. It’s a decision-making session.

    The right people are those who own a Goal or a Strategy on the OGSM — typically your leadership team or department heads. If you’re a small business owner, this might just be you and one or two key team members.

    A useful rule: if someone can’t directly act on what’s discussed, they probably don’t need to be there.

    The Agenda That Works

    Step 1: Open With the Objective (5 minutes)

    Start every meeting by reading the Objective out loud. Not as a ritual — as a reset. It refocuses the room on direction before anyone dives into numbers.

    Ask one question: “Are we still headed in the right direction?” If the answer is genuinely no, the agenda changes. Otherwise, move on.

    Step 2: Review the Measures (15–20 minutes)

    Your Measures are the leading indicators that tell you whether your Strategies are working before it’s too late to adjust. Go through them one by one.

    For each Measure, ask:

    • What is the current status versus the target?
    • Is it green, amber, or red?
    • If it’s amber or red, why?

    Keep this factual. No blame, no defensiveness. You’re diagnosing, not judging.

    Step 3: Review the Goals (15–20 minutes)

    Goals are your lagging indicators — the outcomes you’re working toward. They tell you whether your Strategies are delivering results.

    Walk through each Goal:

    • Where do we stand against the target?
    • Are we on track for the period-end figure?
    • Which Strategies are contributing, and which aren’t?

    This is where the connection between strategy and outcome becomes visible. If a Measure is green but the related Goal is red, something in your diagnosis or strategy logic is off.

    Step 4: Agree on Actions (15–20 minutes)

    This is the most important part of the meeting — and the one most often rushed.

    Based on what you’ve just reviewed, agree on one to three specific actions to take before the next meeting. Not themes. Not intentions. Actions, with a named owner and a due date.

    A useful format:

    “By [date], [name] will [specific action] in order to [expected impact on Goal or Measure].”

    Three concrete actions with owners will do more for your strategy than ten discussion points with no follow-through.

    Step 5: Update the OGSM (10 minutes)

    Before the meeting closes, update your OGSM document with:

    • Current status on each Measure and Goal (RAG rating)
    • Actions agreed, with owners and dates
    • Any changes to a Strategy if one has clearly stopped working

    This keeps your OGSM a living document rather than a snapshot from last quarter. If you’re working from a shared template — a PowerPoint or Excel version — update it during the meeting so everyone leaves with the same picture.

    Step 6: Close With One Sentence (5 minutes)

    End every review with a one-sentence summary: “Our strategy is [on track / needs attention in one area / requires a course correction] — our priority action is [X].”

    It sounds simple, but a clear verbal close does two things: it reinforces alignment, and it gives anyone who needs to communicate the outcome to their teams a ready-made message.

    How Often Should You Meet?

    For most teams, a monthly rhythm works well during the first year of an OGSM cycle. Monthly is frequent enough to catch issues early, and infrequent enough to allow time for actions to take effect.

    If your strategy is in a critical period — a turnaround, a major launch, a tight quarter — move to bi-weekly. If things are running smoothly and your Measures are consistently green, quarterly is fine.

    The worst cadence is no cadence. A strategy that’s only reviewed when something goes wrong is a strategy that exists on paper only.

    Common Pitfalls to Avoid

    Reporting instead of reviewing. There’s a difference between presenting a slide of numbers and genuinely asking why those numbers are what they are. Push for the “why” every time.

    Skipping the action step. If the meeting ends without agreed actions, it wasn’t a review — it was a briefing. Always leave with ownership.

    Changing the strategy too often. If a Strategy changes every month, you never find out whether it was working. Give strategies at least two or three review cycles before you adjust them.

    Making it too long. Ninety minutes is enough for most teams. If you regularly run over, the problem is usually unclear preparation, not insufficient time.

    Prepare Before You Meet

    A strategy review is only as good as the data going into it. Before the meeting:

    • Update Measure and Goal data against targets
    • Flag any items that need discussion (not just reporting)
    • Share the updated OGSM with participants at least 24 hours in advance

    If participants walk into the room seeing the numbers for the first time, the first half of the meeting is wasted on comprehension rather than diagnosis.

    The Right Tool Makes It Easier

    Running an effective strategy review is much easier when your OGSM is in a format that’s built for it — one where Measures, Goals, and RAG status are all visible on one page, and where the whole team is looking at the same document.

    If you’re still managing your OGSM in a general-purpose template or a text document, consider moving to a structured format designed for this purpose. The OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel are both built to support exactly this kind of review — with clear layout, RAG indicators, and a structure your team can update in real time. When your tool matches your meeting rhythm, the review practically runs itself.

  • How to Get Your Team to Actually Follow the Strategy

    How to Get Your Team to Actually Follow the Strategy

    Most strategies don’t fail because they’re badly designed. They fail because the people who need to execute them never truly bought in.

    Getting your team to follow the strategy comes down to three things: involving them in building it, communicating the why before the what, and making the plan visible and reviewable on a regular cadence. Teams don’t resist good strategies — they resist strategies they didn’t help shape and don’t fully understand.

    Here’s a practical guide to closing the gap between the strategy you have and the strategy your team actually executes.

    Why Teams Don’t Follow the Strategy

    Research consistently shows that around two-thirds of business strategies fail during execution. The most common reasons have nothing to do with the quality of the strategy itself. They have everything to do with people.

    The typical failure pattern looks like this: leadership spends weeks or months building a strategy. It gets presented at an all-hands meeting or in a town hall. People nod. The slides go into a shared folder. And then nothing changes — because the day-to-day work continues exactly as before.

    The problem isn’t communication. It’s ownership. People don’t execute strategies they don’t feel responsible for. And you can’t create that sense of responsibility by presenting a strategy at someone. You have to build it with them.

    Step 1: Involve the Team in Building the Strategy, Not Just Hearing It

    This is the single biggest lever available to any leader. Strategies built in isolation — in the boardroom, by the senior leadership team, without input from the people who will execute them — almost always underperform strategies built collaboratively.

    It’s not just about buy-in, though that matters enormously. It’s also about quality. The people closest to the work know things that leadership doesn’t. They know which initiatives are realistic and which are wishful thinking. They know where the bottlenecks are. They know what the customer actually says when nobody senior is in the room.

    The practical implication: run a strategy workshop that involves your team in shaping the plan, not just hearing it. Use the OGSM process as your backbone — work through the objective, goals, and strategies together. People commit to what they helped create.

    This doesn’t mean the final strategy is decided by committee. Leadership still sets the direction. But there’s a world of difference between “here is the strategy” and “we built this strategy together, and here is how your work connects to it.”

    Step 2: Communicate the Why Before the What

    Most strategy communication starts in the wrong place. It opens with the plan — the goals, the initiatives, the timelines — before ever explaining why the strategy exists and why it matters right now.

    People don’t need to memorise the plan. They need to understand the reasoning behind it. When they do, they can make better decisions independently — without waiting to be told what to do in every situation.

    Before sharing the OGSM itself, answer these three questions for your team:

    • Why now? What changed in the market, the business, or the environment that makes this strategy necessary?
    • Why this direction? What alternatives did you consider, and why did you choose this path over others?
    • What’s at stake? What happens if the strategy succeeds — and what happens if it doesn’t?

    Teams that understand the reasoning behind a strategy are far more likely to adapt intelligently when circumstances change — rather than rigidly following a plan that no longer fits, or abandoning it altogether when they hit the first obstacle.

    Step 3: Make the Strategy Visible

    One of the great advantages of OGSM is that it fits on a single page. Use that. A strategy that lives in a presentation file and gets opened twice a year isn’t a strategy — it’s an archive.

    Pin the OGSM somewhere your team sees it regularly. Print it. Post it in the shared workspace, physical or digital. Open every team meeting with a glance at the relevant strategies and measures. Keep it alive as a working document, not a historical record.

    The goal is to make the strategy the natural context for every decision your team makes. When someone proposes a new initiative, the first question should be: which strategy does this support? If it doesn’t support any of them, that’s useful information.

    Step 4: Connect Individual Roles to the Strategic Goals

    Abstract strategy doesn’t motivate people. Personal relevance does. Every person on your team should be able to answer the question: “What specifically am I doing that contributes to this strategy?”

    This is where OGSM’s cascade becomes powerful. Once you have a company-level OGSM, each team or department can build their own — with strategies and measures that connect directly to the level above. An individual’s day-to-day initiatives should be traceable, step by step, all the way up to the company objective.

    When people can draw that line from their daily work to the bigger picture, the strategy stops feeling like something leadership does and starts feeling like something everyone is part of.

    Step 5: Review It Together, Regularly

    A strategy only stays alive if it’s regularly revisited. Build a review cadence into your team’s rhythm — monthly or quarterly — where you look at the OGSM together, assess progress against the measures, identify what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust accordingly.

    These reviews serve two purposes. First, they keep the strategy current — adjusting initiatives and measures as the situation evolves. Second, and equally important, they send a consistent signal: this strategy matters, we take it seriously, and we’re accountable to it as a team.

    The review meeting is where strategy execution actually happens. Without it, even the best-built OGSM will quietly fade into the background as the urgency of day-to-day work takes over.

    Step 6: Celebrate Progress, Not Just Results

    Strategy execution is a long game. Annual goals don’t get achieved in a week. If your team only hears about the strategy when something goes wrong or a target is missed, the strategy becomes associated with pressure and criticism — not progress and purpose.

    Deliberately acknowledge progress along the way. A strategy that was 20% executed three months ago and is now 60% executed is a team that’s moving. Recognise it. Name the specific initiatives that drove the progress. Connect the dots between the team’s effort and the results on the OGSM.

    Momentum is a strategy execution tool. Teams that feel they’re winning keep going. Teams that feel they’re failing — regardless of actual progress — disengage.

    The Common Thread: Ownership

    Every step in this guide points to the same underlying principle: strategy execution is an ownership problem, not a communication problem.

    You can communicate a strategy perfectly — clearly, frequently, in multiple formats — and still see it fail if the people executing it don’t feel personally responsible for its success. Building that ownership requires involvement in the strategy’s creation, clarity about the reasoning behind it, visible connection between individual work and collective goals, and a consistent rhythm of review and recognition.

    OGSM is built for exactly this. Its one-page format makes the strategy accessible. Its collaborative creation process builds ownership. Its review structure keeps it alive. When it’s used well, the OGSM isn’t a document your team files away — it’s the plan they work from every day.

    Build the Foundation First

    If your team doesn’t yet have an OGSM to rally around, that’s the right place to start. Our OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel give you a structured, ready-to-use framework you can build with your team in a single session — and share immediately in a format everyone can work from.

    A strategy your team helped build is a strategy your team will execute. Start there.

    Related: What Is OGSM? | Top 10 OGSM Tips | OGSM for Startups