The OGSM template looks deceptively simple — four boxes — and most teams fill it in wrong in exactly the same predictable ways.
The most common OGSM mistakes aren’t about formatting — they’re about thinking. Most teams fill in the template correctly but miss the logic underneath: one clear Objective, a single measurable Goal, Strategies that genuinely guide decisions, and Measures that tell you whether the strategy is working. Fix the thinking, and the template takes care of itself.
If you’ve read our complete OGSM guide, you already know what a well-built OGSM looks like. But knowing the framework and executing it cleanly are two very different things. I’ve reviewed hundreds of OGSMs over the years — from scrappy startups to global multinationals — and the same mistakes show up again and again. Here are the seven I see most often, and exactly how to fix them.
Are you confusing Strategies with Goals?
This is the mistake that derails more OGSM sessions than anything else. Teams write their Strategies as if they’re Goals — big aspirational statements with no clear direction — or they write their Goal as if it’s a Strategy, detailing how they’ll achieve it before they’ve defined what success looks like.
Here’s the distinction in plain English: your Goal is the specific, quantifiable outcome you’re aiming for this year. Your Strategies are the few critical choices you’re making about how to get there.
“Grow revenue by 20%” is a Goal. “Focus exclusively on enterprise accounts in financial services” is a Strategy. “Launch a digital marketing programme” is not a Strategy — it’s a tactic pretending to be one (more on that shortly).
If your Strategy could have been written by any company in your industry, it’s not a strategy. It needs to reflect a genuine choice — one that implies you’re not doing something else.
Are your Measures tracking activity instead of outcomes?
This one is subtle and absolutely kills the usefulness of your OGSM.
Activity metrics tell you what your team did. Outcome metrics tell you whether it worked. “Number of customer meetings held” is activity. “Pipeline value generated from new customer meetings” is outcome. “Blog posts published per month” is activity. “Organic traffic from target keyword cluster” is outcome.
I see teams build Measures columns full of activity metrics and then wonder why their OGSM doesn’t feel connected to real performance. It’s because they’re measuring effort, not impact.
The fix is simple but requires honesty: for every Measure on your OGSM, ask “could we hit this number while the strategy completely fails?” If yes, it’s an activity metric. Find the outcome it’s supposed to drive and measure that instead.
Your Measures should make you slightly uncomfortable — they should be the honest test of whether your Strategies are actually working.
Do you have too many Goals?
OGSM stands for Objective, Goal (singular), Strategies, Measures. Not Goals. One Goal.
I know — you have a lot of priorities. So does every leadership team I’ve ever worked with. But the discipline of committing to a single, primary Goal for the year is precisely where the OGSM earns its keep. If you have five Goals, you don’t have a strategy — you have a list.
The Goal should be the one number that tells you, at year end, whether you succeeded. Everything else — margin, customer satisfaction, team engagement — should either roll up into that Goal or show up as Measures: the guardrails that confirm the Goal was achieved the right way.
When a leadership team pushes back and says “we can’t possibly have just one Goal,” I ask them: if you could only hit one of your five goals, which would it be? That’s your Goal. The rest are constraints or secondary measures.
Are you cascading your OGSM by copying instead of translating?
One of the most powerful things about OGSM is how it cascades through an organisation. The executive team’s OGSM becomes the brief that each function uses to build their own. But there’s a mistake I see constantly: teams just copy the parent OGSM and change the header.
That’s not a cascade. That’s a photocopy.
When you cascade an OGSM, each team needs to ask: “Given our parent’s Strategies, what is our contribution? What does our team uniquely need to achieve, and what choices do we need to make to deliver it?” The team-level OGSM should look different from the company-level one — different Goal, Strategies specific to that function, Measures that track what that team can actually control.
If your sales team’s OGSM and your marketing team’s OGSM have the same Strategies, something has gone wrong. See our guide to OGSM measures for examples of how this plays out in practice at the team level.
Does each Measure have a named owner?
A Measure without an owner is a wish, not a commitment.
This is the accountability gap I see in almost every OGSM that’s struggling to get traction. The team agrees on Measures in the planning session, everyone nods, the document gets saved to the shared drive — and then three months later, nobody can tell you where those numbers stand because nobody was specifically responsible for tracking and reporting them.
Fix it in the planning session itself: before you leave the room, every Measure gets a name next to it. That person is accountable for knowing the number, updating it in your quarterly review, and flagging when it’s off track. It doesn’t mean they’re doing all the work to move the number — it means they’re the one making sure it doesn’t get forgotten.
Are you setting it and forgetting it?
This is the OGSM mistake that makes all the others worse.
An OGSM built in January and reviewed in December isn’t a strategic management tool — it’s an expensive planning exercise. The value of the OGSM is in the quarterly rhythm: stopping to ask “are our Strategies still the right ones?”, “what are our Measures telling us?”, “do we need to adapt?”
I built the discipline of quarterly OGSM reviews into every leadership team I’ve worked with, and it consistently changes the quality of conversation. Instead of “how are we doing against targets?”, the question becomes “is our strategy working?” Those are very different conversations, and the second one is where the real leadership thinking happens.
Build your quarterly review into the calendar on day one. Protect it. Use the Measures column as your agenda. If a Measure is green, move fast. If it’s red, dig into whether you have an execution problem or a strategy problem — that distinction matters enormously, and the OGSM is the tool that surfaces it.
Are your Strategies actually tactics in disguise?
Strategies that are really just big tactics — this is the OGSM common mistake that makes me wince most often.
A Strategy should answer the question: “What is the critical choice we’re making about how we compete or operate?” A tactic answers: “What specific action are we taking?” The problem is that tactics masquerade as strategies all the time.
“Invest in digital marketing” is a tactic. “Own the consideration phase of the buyer journey through content, before competitors engage” is a Strategy. “Hire three enterprise sales reps” is a tactic. “Win by relationship depth rather than price competition” is a Strategy.
The test I use: if your Strategy still leaves the question “but how will you do that?” unanswered, you’ve got a real Strategy. If it fully describes the execution, it belongs in your project plan, not your OGSM.
Getting this right takes practice. The first time most leadership teams write Strategies, they come out as tactics. That’s fine — the conversation about the difference is itself valuable. Push through it.
OGSM common mistakes are almost always thinking mistakes, not template mistakes. The format is simple. The discipline — the honest single Goal, the real Strategies, the outcome Measures, the ownership, the review cadence — that’s what separates teams who use OGSM as a living management tool from those who treat it as an annual ritual. Start with our complete OGSM guide if you’re building from scratch, and use this list as your quality check before you hit publish.
Rock on.
