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?”