Rock Your Strategy

Tag: strategic planning

  • 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.

  • Using OGSM to Build Your HR Strategy (With KPI Examples)

    Using OGSM to Build Your HR Strategy (With KPI Examples)

    Most HR strategies live in a slide deck that no one else in the business reads, references, or holds the HR function accountable to.

    OGSM for HR works by translating your company’s Strategies into people-function Goals and Measures. Instead of a standalone HR plan that runs parallel to the business, you build an HR OGSM that cascades directly from the corporate OGSM — so every people initiative traces back to a strategic bet the organisation has already made.

    This guide shows you how to build an HR OGSM that cascades directly from the corporate plan — with worked Goal examples, HR-specific Strategies, and a section on how to use it in budget and leadership conversations.

    HR strategy has a credibility problem. Not because HR leaders lack strategic thinking — it’s because the formats HR typically uses to communicate strategy (the 40-slide annual deck, the values posters, the competency framework) don’t connect to how the rest of the business plans. The CFO has a financial plan. The CPO has a product roadmap. The CHRO has a presentation.

    OGSM changes that. A one-page HR OGSM, built from the same framework the board uses for corporate strategy, is something every executive in the room can read, challenge, and hold the HR function accountable to. That shift — from HR as a support function with a deck to HR as a strategic function with a plan — is what most people-leaders are actually trying to achieve.

    Why Does HR Need a Strategy Framework at All?

    The honest answer: because people decisions are strategic decisions, and right now most organisations don’t treat them that way.

    Think about what’s actually inside an HR strategy: hiring plans, capability development, culture, performance management, compensation. These aren’t administrative choices — they’re the mechanisms by which a company builds the capacity to execute its strategy. Hire the wrong profiles and your growth plan stalls. Let attrition go unmanaged and your institutional knowledge walks out the door.

    The problem is that annual HR decks tend to list activities — programmes, initiatives, policies to update — rather than outcomes. The result is that HR leadership spends a lot of time defending budget for things that are hard to connect to business results.

    OGSM solves this by forcing the HR function to answer the same questions every other part of the business answers: What are we trying to achieve? How will we know if we’ve achieved it? What are we doing to get there? Expressed in a format that sits comfortably next to the corporate plan, not in a separate binder that only gets opened at the annual people review.

    I’ve seen HR teams go from defending headcount in budget reviews to setting the strategic agenda, simply by putting a one-page OGSM in front of the leadership team. The framework doesn’t change what HR does — it changes how clearly HR can show why it matters.

    How Do You Build an HR OGSM?

    The process follows the same four-layer logic as any OGSM, but each layer is interpreted through the lens of the people function. If your leadership team needs a shared grounding in the framework first, the full OGSM guide is the right starting point — then come back here for the HR-specific application.

    Step 1: Derive your HR Objective from the company Objective.

    Your HR Objective should be a direct expression of what the HR function needs to achieve for the company to hit its corporate Objective. If the company Objective is “become the most responsive B2B software provider in the UK mid-market,” the HR Objective might be: “Build the hiring engine and talent capability to power our scale — attracting, developing, and retaining the people the company needs to win.”

    The Objective is qualitative and aspirational, but it should be specific to your planning horizon. “Attract and retain great people” is not an Objective — it’s a job description. In my experience, the most common mistake at this stage is writing an HR Objective that sounds inspirational but doesn’t trace back to anything specific in the corporate plan.

    Step 2: Set Goals in people metrics.

    Goals in an HR OGSM are the quantified outcomes you’re committing to by year-end. They should be directly measurable and clearly linked to business impact. Good HR Goals typically come from three categories:

    • Acquisition: time-to-hire, offer acceptance rate, quality-of-hire scores
    • Retention and engagement: attrition rate, employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), regrettable loss rate
    • Capability: internal promotion rate, learning and development hours, performance distribution

    Aim for three to five Goals. Too many and the function loses focus. Too few and you’re probably not capturing the full scope of what’s at stake.

    Step 3: Define Strategies as people programmes and directional choices.

    HR Strategies are the choices you’re making about how you’ll move the needle on your Goals. They should be specific enough to brief a programme against, and they should map back to the company Strategies — each HR Strategy is the people-function response to a business-level strategic bet.

    For a company scaling aggressively into a new market, an HR Strategy might be: “Build a structured talent acquisition capability, shifting from reactive hiring to a proactive talent pipeline in our three key skill families.” That’s a directional choice that implies resourcing, tooling, and process decisions.

    Step 4: Set Measures as the KPIs you’ll track to know if the Strategies are working.

    Measures in an HR OGSM are the leading indicators — the data points that tell you whether your Strategies are executing before you can see it in the Goal outcomes. If your Strategy is building a talent pipeline, the Measure isn’t “time-to-hire” (that’s the Goal) — it’s “number of qualified candidates in active pipeline by role family” or “percentage of hires from proactive pipeline vs. reactive posting.”

    What Do Good HR OGSM Measures Look Like?

    This is where many HR OGSMs stall — not for lack of data, but for lack of agreed benchmarks. Here are five HR KPIs that work well as OGSM Measures, with the ranges I’d treat as credible targets for a scaling organisation.

    Time-to-hire: ≤21 days. Measured from job approval to accepted offer. Anything above 30 days in a competitive talent market is costing you candidates. The benchmark tightens for senior roles, but 21 days is a solid target for the majority of hires.

    Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): ≥30. Measured quarterly via a simple survey (“How likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work? 0–10”). A score of 30 puts you in the “good” range for most industries. Above 50 is excellent. Below 0 is a serious retention risk.

    Internal promotion rate: ≥25%. The percentage of open roles filled by internal candidates. Below 20% is a signal that either your development programmes aren’t working or your hiring managers don’t trust internal talent. Above 40% may indicate you’re not bringing in enough external perspective.

    L&D hours per employee per year: ≥20 hours. Twenty hours is roughly one learning day per quarter — achievable without dedicated learning infrastructure. Below 10 hours suggests learning is something the organisation talks about but doesn’t fund in practice.

    Retention rate: ≥88%. Equivalently, voluntary attrition below 12%. Above 15% in most sectors becomes structurally expensive — replacement costs typically run 50–150% of salary when you factor in hiring, onboarding, and lost productivity.

    These are starting points, not universal standards. Industry, company stage, and role mix all affect what “good” looks like in your context. But having explicit targets agreed at the start of the year changes the nature of the people review from a discussion about activity to a review of performance against plan.

    How Do You Connect Your HR OGSM to the Company OGSM?

    The connection is through cascade logic: every HR Strategy should trace back to a company Strategy. If you can’t make that link, the HR Strategy either doesn’t belong in the current year’s plan, or you need to go back to the corporate OGSM and ask whether it’s capturing the right things.

    In practice, the cascade works like this. The corporate OGSM includes a Strategy: “Scale our commercial team to triple revenue in the DACH region.” That Strategy implies a set of people requirements: specific hiring profiles, a different onboarding model, possibly new compensation structures for a European market. The HR OGSM captures those requirements as HR Strategies and Goals — not in a generic way, but in direct response to the specific business bet.

    This is the mechanism that gives HR strategy its credibility. When the CFO asks “why are we investing in this capability development programme?”, the answer isn’t “because L&D is important” — it’s “because Strategy 2 in the corporate OGSM requires us to build the product capability our current team doesn’t have, and this programme is the specific bet we’re making to close that gap.” That’s a different conversation.

    For a deeper look at how cascade logic works across the whole organisation, the OGSM cascade guide is worth reading before you build the first draft of your HR OGSM. And if you want a template to work from, the OGSM template includes a format that translates directly to HR use.

    The people function doesn’t need a separate strategy process. It needs to be built into the same one everyone else is using.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM for Startups: Does It Work Before Product-Market Fit?

    OGSM for Startups: Does It Work Before Product-Market Fit?

    There’s a version of OGSM that works before product-market fit — and it fits on a whiteboard.

    Most strategic frameworks were built for organisations that already know what they’re doing. OGSM is no exception — it was designed for Procter & Gamble, not for a two-person team pivoting every 90 days. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless before you hit product-market fit. It means you have to strip it back.

    This post walks through what pre-PMF OGSM looks like in practice, what to cut, and when you should forget OGSM entirely.

    Can OGSM Work Before You Have Product-Market Fit?

    Yes — with significant caveats.

    OGSM’s strength is alignment. It forces a team to agree on one Objective, a small number of Goals that define what success looks like, a handful of Strategies that describe how you’ll get there, and Measures that tell you whether your Strategies are working.

    At the pre-PMF stage, the alignment problem is real. Co-founders argue about whether to prioritise the enterprise deal or the self-serve funnel. The first engineer builds for scale while the founders are still testing whether anyone wants the product. A one-page strategic document can cut through that noise faster than any amount of Slack discussion.

    But here’s where it gets complicated. In a mature organisation, every element of an OGSM is grounded in data — historical performance, market research, validated positioning. Pre-PMF, you don’t have that. Your Objective, Goals, and Strategies are all hypotheses. Nothing is validated. The market may tell you in month three that your core assumption was wrong, and you’ll need to rewrite the whole thing.

    That’s fine. The OGSM is not a contract — it’s a shared bet. The value is the alignment it creates now, not the accuracy it guarantees later. But to get that value without the overhead, your pre-PMF OGSM needs to feel less like a three-year plan and more like a focused hypothesis for the next six months. Horizon matters enormously here. Cut it to 90–180 days maximum and commit to reviewing it at the end of that window.

    What Does a Pre-PMF OGSM Actually Look Like?

    Here’s a worked example for a pre-revenue B2B SaaS startup building a compliance automation tool for SMEs.

    Objective: Become the compliance automation tool that professional services SMEs trust to manage their audit trails.

    Goals:

    1. Achieve 10 paying customers (minimum £99/month) by end of month five
    2. Reach NPS > 50 among pilot users after 60 days of use

    Strategies:

    1. Direct outreach to compliance managers in legal and accounting firms via founder-led LinkedIn outreach — 20 targeted messages per founder per week, no automation
    2. Ship fortnightly based on pilot feedback — biweekly releases tied directly to the highest-friction moments identified in customer interviews
    3. Run a 30-day free pilot with white-glove onboarding — reduce time-to-value so pilots convert before fatigue sets in

    Measures:

    • Outreach response rate (target: ≥15%)
    • Pilot-to-paid conversion rate (target: ≥40%)
    • Weekly active users among pilot cohort (target: ≥70%)

    Notice what this OGSM is doing — and what it isn’t.

    The Objective is qualitative and directional. It describes the position you want to own in your market, not a number you want to hit by a date. That logic belongs in Goals. Goals are where the measurable commitments live — 10 customers, NPS above 50. They tell you whether you’re on track to reach the Objective.

    Each Strategy is a real bet: a specific channel, a specific cadence, a specific go-to-market mechanism. There’s no hedging. If you chose LinkedIn outreach, you chose it over cold email, paid ads, and inbound SEO. That trade-off is the strategy. If every option still looks equally valid, you haven’t made a decision yet.

    The Measures are leading indicators, not lagging ones. Outreach response rate tells you whether your messaging is resonating before you know whether it converts. Pilot-to-paid conversion tells you whether the product earns its price before you’ve closed enough deals to know if the model works. That’s the point — Measures should give you signal early enough to change course.

    That’s it. One Objective. Two Goals. Three Strategies. A handful of Measures. It fits on one page. It could fit on a whiteboard. Nothing here requires a planning retreat or a strategy consultant — just a shared answer to the question: what are we actually trying to prove, and how?

    What Should You Strip Out of a Pre-PMF OGSM?

    Cascading Measures. In a full OGSM implementation, every Strategy has its own Measure set, and you may cascade further down into team or function-level Measures. Skip this entirely. You don’t have enough stable KPIs yet, and you’ll spend more time debating which metric belongs to which Strategy than you will running experiments. At this stage, pick three to five Measures that collectively tell you whether the Objective is on track — and leave it there. (For reference on what strong Measures look like at a later stage, see 7 OGSM Mistakes That Kill Your Strategy — the most common one is Measures that are outputs, not leading indicators.)

    More than three Strategies. If you have five or six Strategies pre-PMF, you’re either hedging or you haven’t made a real bet yet. Three Strategies is a hard cap. Preferably two. Each Strategy should represent a real trade-off — something you’re choosing to do instead of something else. If every option looks equally valid, you haven’t done the hard prioritisation work. Pick the bets with the most signal-per-effort and cut the rest.

    More than three Goals. Your Goals define what success looks like. Two to three Goals forces you to get specific about what actually matters in the next 90–180 days. More than that and you’re writing a wish list, not a strategy. If you have five Goals and they’re all “critical,” none of them are. Ruthlessly narrow it down to the two outcomes that would genuinely change what you do next.

    Long time horizons. Don’t write a three-year OGSM at the pre-PMF stage. You don’t have the data to justify it, and it will be out of date before the ink is dry. Stick to 90–180 days. Review it at the end of that period. If your hypothesis has changed — and it probably will — update your Objective and reset.

    How Do You Build Your First Pre-PMF OGSM?

    You don’t need a facilitated off-site. You need a half-day session with your co-founders and a shared document. Here’s a simple sequence that works.

    Start with the Objective. Before anything else, spend 30–45 minutes on the Objective alone. Write it individually, then compare. The Objective should describe the strategic position you’re trying to own — qualitative, directional, no dates. If you and your co-founder write different Objectives, that’s the most important conversation you’ll have all quarter. Don’t paper over it by merging both into a long sentence. Decide.

    Draft the Goals together. Once the Objective is agreed, Goals follow relatively quickly. Goals answer: what does success look like in numbers, by when? Aim for two Goals maximum at this stage. If you find yourself wanting a third, ask whether it’s really a Measure in disguise.

    Challenge every Strategy. For each proposed Strategy, ask: what is this instead of? If you can’t answer that, it’s not a Strategy — it’s a preference. A genuine Strategy has an opportunity cost. Write the alternative you rejected next to each Strategy you kept, and make sure the team understands why you chose this one.

    Set your Measures last. Measures are often written first because they feel concrete and comfortable. Write them last. Start from your Strategies and ask: what would tell us, within 30 days, whether this Strategy is working? The answer to that question is your Measure. If you can’t answer it, your Strategy isn’t specific enough yet.

    The whole session should take three to four hours maximum. If it’s taking longer, you’re probably arguing about the Objective — which means you skipped the most important step.

    What If You Don’t Know Your Objective Yet?

    This is the real test.

    OGSM’s entire structure hangs on the Objective. Everything else — Goals, Strategies, Measures — is in service of that one sentence. If you can’t write a clear Objective that your co-founders agree on, you’re not ready for OGSM yet.

    And that’s not a failure. It’s useful information.

    If you and your co-founder spend 45 minutes trying to write the Objective and can’t agree, you’ve just uncovered a misalignment that would have derailed any planning process. The OGSM template has done its job without you completing it.

    Common pre-PMF blockers to a clear Objective:

    • Disagreement about whether you’re targeting enterprises or SMEs
    • Uncertainty about whether you’re selling a product or a service
    • No shared view of the time horizon you’re planning against
    • An Objective that’s really a Goal (“grow to 100 customers”) rather than a directional statement (“become the default compliance tool for UK professional services firms”)

    That last one trips up a lot of founding teams. An Objective describes a position — where you want to be in the market, and for whom. A Goal describes a result — what you will achieve by a specific date. If your Objective has a number in it, it’s probably a Goal. For worked examples of how to write a strong OGSM Objective at different stages, see OGSM Objectives Examples.

    If you’re still stuck, don’t force the OGSM. Work on the Objective first — even if that means a half-day offsite with your co-founders before you open the template.

    What’s the Alternative at the Very Earliest Stage?

    If your team is fewer than five people, you’ve spoken to fewer than twenty potential customers, and you’re still testing your core value hypothesis — you might not need OGSM at all yet.

    Two simpler tools worth trying first:

    A one-pager. One sentence on the problem you’re solving, one sentence on the customer you’re solving it for, one sentence on your hypothesis about the solution, and three bullet points on what you’ll do in the next 30 days to test it. Fits in Notion. Can be updated in five minutes. Does not require a planning process.

    A hypothesis map. A simple visual structure: your assumption (customers in segment X will pay for Y to solve Z), the experiments you’re running to test it, and what you’ll conclude from each outcome. This is close enough to strategic planning for the very early stage without the overhead of a full OGSM structure.

    Neither of these replaces OGSM. They’re pre-OGSM — the planning work you do before you have enough signal to build a real strategy. Think of them as the foundation you lay so that, when you do write your first OGSM, it’s grounded in real customer understanding rather than founder assumptions.

    When Should You Graduate to a Full OGSM?

    Watch for three signals:

    1. A validated Objective. You know who your customer is, what job they’re hiring your product to do, and you have paying customers (not just pilots) who confirm it. Your Objective is no longer a hypothesis — it’s a direction the business has already started moving in.

    2. Stable KPIs. Your core metrics aren’t changing every sprint. You’ve settled on the two or three numbers that actually tell you whether the business is working — churn, CAC payback, NRR, whatever fits your model. Stable Measures are the prerequisite for a meaningful Measures cascade. If your definition of a “good week” changes month to month, you’re not there yet.

    3. A team that needs alignment. If it’s two co-founders and a contractor, informal alignment is probably fine. Once you’re hiring fast enough that people are making decisions without full context, OGSM starts earning its overhead. The first sign is usually when you realise two team members have conflicting assumptions about the strategy — and neither of them is wrong, they just never compared notes.

    Once you hit those three signals, you’re ready for the full version — Goals that cascade into team-level goals, Measures for each Strategy, and a quarterly planning process that involves the whole leadership team. For a detailed guide to what that looks like at the 20–100 person stage, see Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up?.

    OGSM is a focused tool. Used at the pre-PMF stage, it works best when it’s small, honest about uncertainty, and reviewed often. The goal isn’t to have a perfect strategy. It’s to have a shared bet — one that everyone on the founding team can recite from memory and hold each other accountable to.

    Rock on.

  • The OGSM Measures Column: Two Types, One Big Mistake Most Teams Make

    The OGSM Measures Column: Two Types, One Big Mistake Most Teams Make

    The OGSM Measures column does two jobs at once — and most teams only see one of them.

    The Measures column holds two fundamentally different types of content: Dashboard Measures (KPIs that tell you whether your strategy is working) and Action Plan Measures (specific initiatives with owners and deadlines that will make it work). Most teams treat the column as a single unified list and end up with a document that is neither a useful dashboard nor a credible action plan. Separating the two is the single clearest way to make your Measures column actually useful.

    This article explains both measure types in detail, shows you what each looks like in practice, and gives you a clear test for which type belongs where in your Measures column.

    OGSM Measures Explained: What Is the Measures Column Actually For?

    If you’ve read a standard OGSM explanation, you’ve probably seen the Measures column described as “how you’ll know you’re succeeding.” That’s true, but incomplete. In practice, the column carries two fundamentally different types of information — and they serve different masters.

    One type answers: Is our strategy working?
    The other answers: What are we doing to make it work?

    These are not the same question. Conflating them is how an OGSM ends up as a project plan dressed up as a strategy.

    What Are Dashboard Measures?

    Dashboard Measures are the KPIs that track whether a Strategy is delivering results. They’re lagging or leading indicators — numbers you monitor regularly to diagnose health, not manage tasks.

    What they look like:

    • Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth: +8% quarter-on-quarter
    • Customer retention rate: ≥ 87%
    • Net Promoter Score: ≥ 42 (tracked monthly)
    • Time to hire: ≤ 21 days

    These measures exist to answer one question: is the Strategy producing the outcome we predicted? They’re visible on a dashboard, reviewed in monthly or quarterly business reviews, and owned by whoever is accountable for the Strategy.

    Dashboard Measures should be outcome-oriented, quantified, and time-bound. If a measure can’t be plotted on a trend line over time, it probably isn’t a Dashboard Measure.

    The review cadence for Dashboard Measures aligns with your strategic review rhythm — typically monthly for fast-moving strategies, quarterly for longer-horizon objectives. For more on building that rhythm, see our guide to OGSM review cadence.

    What Are Action Plan Measures?

    Action Plan Measures are the specific initiatives, workstreams, and milestones that will cause the strategy to succeed. They’re not metrics — they’re commitments.

    What they look like:

    • Launch new onboarding email sequence — Owner: Head of CX — Due: 30 June
    • Complete competitive pricing review — Owner: Commercial Director — Due: 15 May
    • Pilot referral programme in 3 accounts — Owner: Sales Lead — Due: Q3

    Action Plan Measures carry three essential components: what is being done, who owns it, and by when. Without all three, it’s a wish, not a measure.

    These are reviewed in operational rhythm — weekly or fortnightly in execution meetings. They’re not strategic indicators; they’re the levers you’re pulling to move the strategic indicators.

    What’s the Difference Between Dashboard and Action Plan Measures?

    Dashboard Measures Action Plan Measures
    What it tracks Outcome / health of the strategy Activities / execution progress
    Who owns it Strategy owner Initiative lead
    Review cadence Monthly / quarterly Weekly / fortnightly
    Format Number + target + trend Task + owner + deadline
    Retail example Like-for-like sales growth ≥ 5% Launch loyalty card pilot — Head of Retail — Q2
    SaaS example Logo churn rate ≤ 1.5% / month Redesign in-app onboarding — Product Lead — May
    Services example Client satisfaction score ≥ 4.2/5 Roll out quarterly account reviews — CS Director — Q1

    The key distinction: Dashboard Measures tell you how you’re doing. Action Plan Measures tell you what you’re doing. Both belong in the Measures column, but they should never be confused with each other.

    What’s the Most Common Mistake Teams Make with Measures?

    Here’s what I see most often when I audit an OGSM: the Measures column is filled entirely with activities.

    “Run leadership training programme.”
    “Implement new CRM.”
    “Review supplier contracts.”

    These aren’t measures. They’re tasks. And when the entire Measures column looks like this, the OGSM has lost its strategic function. You can tick every box and still have no idea whether your strategy is working.

    The underlying cause is usually one of two things: the team found Dashboard Measures hard to define (it requires knowing what “success” actually looks like, which is uncomfortable), or they copied Action Plan items into the Measures column without adding the corresponding KPIs.

    The result is an OGSM that answers what are we doing but never asks is it working. That’s a project plan. A strategy document needs both.

    This connects directly to the most common pattern of OGSM failure. If you’re diagnosing a broader OGSM that feels off, the full OGSM guide covers the framework end-to-end and explains how each column should relate to the others.

    How Do You Tell Dashboard Measures from Action Plan Measures?

    If you’re staring at your Measures column and not sure what you’ve got, run each entry through these three questions:

    1. Can you plot it on a graph over time?
    If yes, it’s probably a Dashboard Measure. If not — if it’s an event that happens once — it’s an Action Plan Measure.

    2. Does it have a named owner and a deadline?
    If it has both, it’s an Action Plan Measure. If it’s tracked at team level without a single accountable person, it’s likely a Dashboard Measure.

    3. Does it tell you if the strategy is working — or just that someone is working on it?
    This is the most important question. A Dashboard Measure tells you about outcomes. An Action Plan Measure tells you about activity. Both are necessary. Neither substitutes for the other.

    For a deeper look at how Measures relate to Goals in the framework, the OGSM Goals vs Measures explainer covers the structural logic in full.

    How Do You Fix Your Measures Column Without Starting Over?

    If your existing OGSM is live and you want to fix the Measures column without rebuilding from scratch, here’s the simplest approach:

    1. Separate the two types. Create two sections within the Measures column: one for Dashboard Measures (KPIs), one for Action Plan (initiatives). Even just labelling them helps.
    2. Check every Dashboard Measure for a number, unit, and timeframe. “Improve retention” is not a measure. “Retention rate ≥ 88% by Q4” is.
    3. Check every Action Plan item for an owner and a deadline. If either is missing, it’s incomplete. No owner means no accountability. No deadline means no urgency.

    This audit takes less than an hour for most OGSMs and tends to surface uncomfortable conversations that were previously hidden inside vague language — which is exactly the point.

    For a complete list of what good Measures look like across different types of organisations, the OGSM Measures examples article covers retail, SaaS, professional services, and public sector in detail.

    Why Does Getting This Distinction Right Actually Matter?

    The OGSM framework works because it forces alignment between intent and action. The Objective captures where you’re going. The Goal quantifies it. The Strategies define how you’ll compete to get there. The Measures column — when it works — shows both whether the strategies are producing results and what the team is doing to execute them.

    When the column collapses into a flat task list, that connection breaks. You lose the feedback loop that makes the OGSM useful as a management tool, not just a planning artifact.

    Get both types of Measures right, and your OGSM becomes something you actually want to open at the start of every review meeting.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM vs Balanced Scorecard: Which Strategy Framework Actually Fits Your Organisation?

    OGSM vs Balanced Scorecard: Which Strategy Framework Actually Fits Your Organisation?

    Both frameworks promise strategic clarity — but they’re solving completely different problems, and using the wrong one will cost you a full planning cycle.

    OGSM (Objective, Goals, Strategies, Measures) is a one-page strategy framework built for clarity and speed — best suited to scale-ups, SMEs, and brand-led organisations that need fast, visible alignment. The Balanced Scorecard, developed by Kaplan and Norton in 1992, is a multi-perspective performance management system that tracks performance across four dimensions: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning & Growth — best suited to complex enterprises that risk optimising for one metric at the expense of everything else. If you need one page and fast alignment, OGSM wins. If you need systemic coverage across a multi-divisional organisation, the Balanced Scorecard earns its complexity.

    Below you’ll find a head-to-head comparison table, an analysis of how each framework handles execution, the most common implementation pitfalls for both, and a clear verdict by organisation type.

    What’s the core philosophical difference between OGSM and the Balanced Scorecard?

    OGSM was designed for clarity under pressure. It fits on one page. Every element earns its place by answering a single coherent question: how does this connect to where we’re going? The framework is linear and intentionally constrained — it forces trade-offs rather than accommodating every priority.

    The Balanced Scorecard was built for a different problem: large organisations that were measuring success almost entirely through financial lagging indicators and missing the signals that predicted future performance. Kaplan and Norton’s answer was four perspectives — each generating its own objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives. The result is a multi-dimensional picture of organisational health, not a single page, but a strategic management system.

    The philosophical gap is real: OGSM asks “what are we doing and how will we know it’s working?”, while the Balanced Scorecard asks “are we measuring our organisation across every dimension that drives sustainable performance?”

    How do the two frameworks actually compare in practice?

    Dimension OGSM Balanced Scorecard
    Origin Procter & Gamble (1950s–60s), popularised in brand management Kaplan & Norton, Harvard Business Review, 1992
    Structure One page: Objective → Goals → Strategies → Measures Four perspectives with linked objectives, measures, targets, initiatives
    Typical length 1 page Multi-page scorecard; often supported by Strategy Maps
    Primary use case Annual planning, brand/product strategy, team alignment Enterprise performance management, board reporting, cross-functional alignment
    Measurement philosophy A small set of critical measures directly tied to strategies Balanced set of leading and lagging indicators across all four perspectives
    Cascade potential Strong — each business unit can hold its own OGSM Strong — designed to cascade from corporate to business unit to team
    Implementation complexity Low–medium Medium–high
    Best fit Scale-ups, SMEs, brand teams, fast-moving environments Enterprises, complex organisations, public sector, multi-divisional firms
    Risk Oversimplification if Objectives are too vague Bureaucracy and metric proliferation if not disciplined

    Does the Balanced Scorecard measure more than OGSM?

    Yes — and that’s both its strength and its danger.

    The Balanced Scorecard’s four perspectives ensure organisations don’t optimise for profit at the expense of customer experience, or win on customer satisfaction while the internal processes quietly erode. The Learning & Growth perspective in particular is often undervalued: it forces companies to ask whether they are building the capabilities and culture needed to execute the strategy, not just reporting on what happened last quarter.

    But more measurement isn’t automatically better. Many organisations that adopt the Balanced Scorecard end up with 40–60 KPIs spread across four perspectives, which produces reporting overhead without strategic clarity. The Balanced Scorecard’s designers anticipated this: Kaplan and Norton recommended no more than 20–25 measures per scorecard and introduced the Strategy Map to make the causal logic between perspectives explicit. In practice, discipline is frequently lost.

    OGSM sidesteps this by design. The Measures column in an OGSM is intentionally sparse — typically three to five metrics that directly validate whether the strategies are working. There’s less systemic coverage, but what’s there is directly actionable.

    Which framework handles strategy execution better?

    Both frameworks are built for execution, not just planning — but they approach it differently.

    OGSM aligns execution through simplicity. When the whole organisation can hold the strategy in their head because it fits on one page, decision-making closer to the frontline improves. Teams can ask: “does this action serve our strategies?” and get a clear answer. Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Mars have used it effectively precisely because it cuts through the noise in complex, multi-brand environments.

    The Balanced Scorecard aligns execution through structural linkage. When a Strategy Map makes visible how Learning & Growth drives better Internal Processes, which improves Customer outcomes, which produces Financial results, senior leaders can track where execution is breaking down at a systemic level. This is particularly powerful when the root cause of underperformance is organisational capability, not strategy choice.

    If you’ve worked through the OKR vs OGSM comparison, you’ll recognise a familiar tension: OKRs share OGSM’s bias toward simplicity and alignment; the Balanced Scorecard shares more DNA with enterprise performance management systems. The right choice depends on what problem you’re actually solving.

    What are the implementation pitfalls for each?

    OGSM pitfalls:

    • Writing an Objective that is really a Goal (specific outcome vs directional ambition)
    • Treating Measures as a reporting exercise rather than a live decision tool
    • Failing to cascade: a corporate OGSM with no team-level OGSMs beneath it stays at the boardroom level and doesn’t change behaviour on the ground

    Balanced Scorecard pitfalls:

    • Metric proliferation: adding measures until the scorecard becomes unmanageable
    • Perspective imbalance: most organisations over-index on Financial and Customer, under-develop Internal Processes and Learning & Growth
    • Strategy Map neglect: building the scorecard without the causal map means you’re reporting data rather than testing strategic hypotheses

    Which framework should your organisation choose?

    Scale-ups and growth-stage companies (50–500 people): OGSM almost always wins here. You need alignment speed, not comprehensive measurement infrastructure. Your leadership team is small enough to hold the strategy in their heads. One page is a feature, not a compromise. Build your OGSM, cascade it to functional leads, and revisit it quarterly. If you’re still weighing whether OGSM is the right fit at your stage, Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up? works through the decision in detail.

    Enterprises and complex multi-divisional organisations (500+ people, multiple business units): The Balanced Scorecard earns its complexity. When you have divisions with genuinely different value drivers, when the board needs a structured view of risk and performance across dimensions, and when strategy execution spans multiple years and organisational layers, the four-perspective structure pays for itself. Invest in a proper Strategy Map before building the scorecard.

    SMEs and owner-managed businesses: OGSM is typically the better fit — fast to build, easy to communicate, and practical to update. Unless your business has board-level governance requirements or operates in a regulated sector where multi-dimensional reporting is mandatory, the Balanced Scorecard’s overhead will slow you down more than it helps.

    Consultants and strategists working across clients: Know both. Use OGSM as your default intervention framework for alignment work; reach for the Balanced Scorecard when a client genuinely needs a performance management system rather than a strategic alignment tool. They are solving different problems.

    Is OGSM better than the Balanced Scorecard?

    Not better — different. OGSM is a better tool for strategic alignment and annual planning in environments where clarity and speed matter. The Balanced Scorecard is a better tool for systemic performance management in complex organisations where the risk is blind spots, not overcomplication.

    The practical test: if you can tell someone your entire strategy on a whiteboard in under five minutes and have them walk away with it, OGSM is working. If you need your leadership team to understand not just where you’re going, but why the organisation is or isn’t capable of getting there across every dimension, you need the Balanced Scorecard.

    For most readers of this site, OGSM is the working framework. But understanding the Balanced Scorecard makes you a sharper strategist — you can borrow its perspective logic to sense-check whether your OGSM is covering enough ground, or whether you have a blind spot hiding behind a simple one-pager.

    Rock on.

  • 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.

  • Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up? A Practical Guide (With Worked Example)

    Is OGSM Right for Your Scale-Up? A Practical Guide (With Worked Example)

    Yes — if you’re between 30 and 200 people and your strategy is starting to slip through the cracks, OGSM is almost certainly the right framework for where you are right now.

    OGSM is a one-page strategic planning tool that forces alignment across a leadership team that can no longer hold the entire company direction in their heads. The OGSM framework perfectly suits small businesses for its simplicity, clarity, and ease of use.

    Here’s how to know for sure, and what building one looks like in practice.

    When does OGSM actually fit a scale-up?

    OGSM — Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures — is a one-page strategic planning framework originally developed at Procter & Gamble. It’s since become widely used across SMEs and multinationals that want every team member reading from the same page of strategy, literally.

    For scale-ups specifically, OGSM fits well when three conditions are true:

    You’re in the £5M–£50M revenue range (or roughly 30–200 people). Below this, the founder’s instincts and weekly all-hands meetings do the job. Above it, you typically need something more sophisticated. In the middle, OGSM’s single-page constraint forces clarity without adding bureaucratic weight.

    You’re transitioning from founder-led intuition to structured strategy. The classic scale-up inflection point is when the leadership team can no longer hold the entire strategy in their heads. Decisions start getting made in silos. Sales pursues a segment the product team isn’t building for. Marketing campaigns features that engineering has de-prioritised. OGSM gives you a shared document that every department head can point to when making trade-offs.

    You’re hiring fast enough that alignment is becoming a friction cost. Onboarding a new Head of Finance or VP of Sales is dramatically faster when you can hand them a single page that captures the company’s direction, the three or four strategies you’re betting on, and the specific numbers you’re tracking to know if it’s working.

    If you recognise your company in those three conditions, OGSM is worth a serious look.

    When do OKRs make more sense?

    I’m not anti-OKR. They’re the right tool for the right context, and it’s worth being clear about when that context applies.

    OKRs work best when:

    • You need fast iteration cycles. OKRs run quarterly, which suits product organisations that ship continuously and need to recalibrate every 90 days based on user feedback.
    • Teams are largely self-organising. OKRs push goal-setting downward. Individual contributors write their own Key Results and align them to company-level Objectives. That’s energising in a high-autonomy culture.
    • You want bottom-up accountability. The OKR model is built on transparency — everyone can see everyone else’s goals. That fosters peer accountability in flat organisations.

    Where OKRs can struggle at scale-up stage: the quarterly cadence can create a wall of sticky notes that no one looks at after week three. Without a longer-horizon strategy document anchoring the OKRs, teams can hit their quarterly numbers and still drift from the company’s three-year direction. OGSM doesn’t replace the quarterly rhythm — but it provides the strategic spine that OKRs hang from.

    Many scale-ups that thrive with OGSM use it to set the 12–18 month strategic frame, then run OKRs within each strategy pillar for quarterly execution. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

    What does a scale-up OGSM look like in practice?

    Company: Findr — a 35-person B2B SaaS business helping professional services firms track project profitability. Revenue: £8M ARR. Growing at 40% YoY. Headcount doubled in 18 months.

    The problem: Three VPs were making independent resourcing decisions. The Head of Engineering was building an enterprise SSO integration. The Head of Marketing was doubling down on SME content. Sales was pitching mid-market. Nobody was wrong — but the company was pulling in three directions.

    Two half-day sessions with the seven-person leadership team produced this:

    Objective: Become the go-to profitability tool for professional services firms in the UK, trusted by 500 firms within three years.

    Goals:

    1. Reach £15M ARR by end of FY26
    2. Achieve NPS of 45+ across the customer base by Q4
    3. Reduce average time-to-value for new customers from 45 days to 20 days by end of FY26

    Strategies (the specific choices about where and how to compete):

    1. Double down on accountancy and legal verticals — not generic SME, not enterprise
    2. Build a referral-first growth model via existing customer champions
    3. Invest in onboarding, not acquisition, until time-to-value hits target

    Measures (leading indicators for each strategy):

    • % of new ARR from accountancy + legal (target: 70% by Q4)
    • % of new pipeline sourced from referrals (target: 35% by Q3)
    • Average onboarding completion rate (target: 85%)

    It fit on one page. Every leadership decision since has been tested against it: Does this serve Strategy 1, 2, or 3? If not, why are we doing it?

    The SSO integration was deprioritised. The SME content was refocused on accountancy and legal pain points. Sales aligned its ICP to match.

    What are the most common scale-up OGSM mistakes?

    1. Too many Strategies. A five-strategy OGSM is not a strategy — it’s a list of things you plan to do. OGSM forces hard choices. If you can’t cut it to three or four strategies, you haven’t made the choices yet. Go back to the Objective and ask which two or three bets would most directly deliver it.

    2. Objectives that are still Goals. “Grow revenue by 40%” is a Goal, not an Objective. An Objective is directional and qualitative: what kind of company are you becoming? Goals are the measurable milestones that prove you’re getting there. Mixing the two is the most common first-draft error. See the 7 OGSM Mistakes guide for a full breakdown.

    3. Measures no one owns. A Measure without an owner is a wish, not a metric. Every Measure in your OGSM needs a named person who updates it at your monthly leadership review. Without ownership, Measures become decorative — and the OGSM stops being a live management tool and starts being a document that lives in a Notion page no one opens.

    How do you get started with OGSM this quarter?

    Step 1: Download a template and run a draft solo. Before you book a team session, write a rough draft of your OGSM yourself. It doesn’t need to be right — it needs to surface the assumptions and gaps that will fuel the real conversation. The free OGSM template gives you the structure to do this in under two hours.

    Step 2: Book two half-day sessions with your leadership team. Don’t try to do this in one four-hour block. End the first session at the Goals. Sleep on it. Return for Strategies and Measures with fresh eyes — the overnight gap changes the conversation quality significantly.

    Step 3: Pick your first monthly review date before you leave the room. The OGSM is not a set-and-forget document. It works because leadership teams use it to run monthly strategy reviews. Book the first one before the session ends, assign each Measure an owner, and commit to a 60-minute review cadence.

    For more context on whether OGSM suits your specific company stage, compare it with the OGSM for Small Business guide. If you’re already running OKRs and wondering whether to switch, the OGSM vs OKR comparison lays out the trade-offs side by side.

    The framework is simple. The discipline is in the choices.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM for Marketing Teams: How to Build a One-Page Marketing Strategy That Actually Connects to the Business

    OGSM for Marketing Teams: How to Build a One-Page Marketing Strategy That Actually Connects to the Business

    If your marketing team runs on OKRs, you’ve probably noticed the problem: the objectives are inspiring, the key results are measurable, but six months in nobody can explain how the marketing plan connects to what the CEO is trying to achieve. OGSM fixes this.

    OGSM for marketing teams is a one-page strategic framework that cascades your marketing plan directly from the company strategy, giving every campaign and KPI a clear line of sight to business-level goals.

    It’s the one planning framework designed to cascade directly from the company strategy — which means your marketing plan stops floating free and starts pulling its weight where it matters. This article explores what a Marketing OGSM looks like, how to translate company goals into marketing goals, and how to get started on yours.

    Why Marketing OKRs Often Float Free of Company Strategy

    OKRs are a great personal productivity tool. They’re less great as a strategy alignment tool — because they don’t have a built-in mechanism for connecting upward.

    When a marketing team sets OKRs, they typically start with what marketing wants to achieve: brand awareness, MQL volume, content reach, social followers. These are legitimate goals. But they’re built from the inside out — from what marketing can control — rather than from the outside in, starting with what the company needs.

    The result is a marketing plan that’s busy, measurable, and largely disconnected from the business priorities that actually matter to the CFO and CEO. OGSM solves this by starting with the company-level plan and working down. If you haven’t already, read what OGSM actually means — it’s the foundation everything else sits on.

    What a Marketing OGSM Looks Like vs. a Company OGSM

    A marketing OGSM has the same four elements as a company OGSM — Objective, Goals, Strategies, Measures — but scoped to the marketing function.

    The key difference: a company OGSM sets the direction for the whole business. A marketing OGSM is built in response to the company OGSM. It identifies which company-level Strategies marketing owns, and builds a plan that directly supports those priorities.

    Think of it as a nested structure. The marketing Objective should be traceable to at least one company Strategy. The marketing Goals should feed into the company Goals. The marketing Strategies are the specific choices marketing is making to hit those Goals — not a restatement of the company plan, but a genuine marketing response to it.

    This is the design principle that makes OGSM different from OKRs for marketing teams. Alignment is baked in, not bolted on.

    How to Translate Company Goals into Marketing Goals

    Before you write a single word of your marketing OGSM, you need the company OGSM in front of you. Specifically, you need the Strategies — because those are the choices the company has made about how it will grow. Marketing’s job is to execute the Strategies that fall in its domain.

    Here’s the translation process:

    Step 1: Identify which company Strategies marketing owns (fully or in part). Common examples: “Grow market share in the SME segment,” “Build brand recognition in new geographies,” “Reduce customer acquisition cost by 20%.” Marketing might own one of these outright or share ownership with Sales.

    Step 2: Identify which company Goals marketing directly influences. Revenue, customer acquisition, market share, NPS — whichever Goals have a marketing lever. Be honest about this. Marketing influences some Goals heavily and others barely at all.

    Step 3: Set marketing Goals that are upstream contributors to company Goals. If the company Goal is £40m ARR, and marketing is responsible for inbound pipeline, your marketing Goal might be “Generate £15m in marketing-sourced pipeline.” If the company Goal is 85% retention, and marketing runs the customer communications programme, your Goal might be “Deliver a quarterly customer newsletter with 30%+ open rate.”

    The test: if marketing hits all its Goals, does the company get meaningfully closer to its Goals? If yes, you’re aligned. If not, rebuild.

    What Are the 4 OGSM Elements for a Marketing Team?

    Objective The marketing Objective is an inspirational, qualitative statement of what marketing is here to achieve in the planning period. It should connect naturally to the company Objective — same ambition, marketing-specific scope.

    Example: If the company Objective is “Become the most recognised name in sustainable workplace furniture,” the Marketing Objective might be: “Make our brand the obvious choice for design-conscious office buyers who care where their furniture comes from.”

    Goals Goals are quantified milestones that measure whether you’re hitting the Objective. They should be ambitious but achievable, with a clear time horizon.

    Example:

    • Generate 3,500 MQLs per quarter by Q4
    • Grow organic website traffic to 80,000 sessions/month
    • Achieve brand recall of 35% in target segment (measured annually)
    • Deliver £18m in marketing-sourced pipeline

    Strategies Strategies are the choices marketing is making — what you will focus on and, implicitly, what you won’t. Three to five is the right number. If you have ten Strategies, you have none.

    Example:

    • Build a content hub targeting mid-funnel buyers in the design and facilities management community
    • Launch a referral programme for existing customers
    • Invest in ABM for the top 50 target accounts
    • Run a co-marketing programme with three complementary brands

    Measures Measures are the metrics you track to know whether your Strategies are working. Each Measure should have an owner, a baseline, and a target.

    Example:

    • Content hub: unique visitors, time-on-page, content-sourced leads
    • Referral programme: referrals generated, referral conversion rate
    • ABM: account engagement score, pipeline from target accounts
    • Co-marketing: partner-sourced leads, event attendance

    What Does a Marketing OGSM Look Like in Practice?

    Example 1: Brand Marketing OGSM (fictional — Greenleaf Office Interiors)

    Objective: Make Greenleaf the most trusted name in sustainable workplace design for UK businesses.

    Goals:

    • 40% aided brand awareness in target segment by year-end
    • 25,000 newsletter subscribers
    • Earned media coverage in 5 tier-1 publications per quarter

    Strategies:

    • Launch “The Sustainable Office” editorial series (long-form content + social)
    • Partner with leading architects and interior designers as brand advocates
    • Sponsor the UK Sustainability in Business Awards category

    Measures: Brand awareness survey (quarterly) | Newsletter subscriber growth | Press mentions | Share of voice in target publications

    Example 2: Demand Generation OGSM (fictional — Clova SaaS)

    Objective: Fill the sales pipeline with high-intent buyers who already understand the problem Clova solves.

    Goals:

    • 800 MQLs per month by Q3
    • SQL conversion rate above 25%
    • Cost per MQL below £45

    Strategies:

    • Build an SEO programme targeting high-intent product comparison and “best [category] software” queries
    • Launch a free ROI calculator to capture mid-funnel buyers
    • Run monthly live demos for warm leads with product team presenters

    Measures: MQL volume | SQL conversion rate | Cost per MQL | Demo attendance | Organic traffic from target keywords

    Example 3: Content Marketing OGSM (fictional — Porthaven Financial)

    Objective: Become the go-to educational resource for first-time business owners navigating financial decisions.

    Goals:

    • 50,000 monthly organic visitors by Q4
    • 10 articles ranking on page 1 for priority keywords
    • 20% of new client enquiries cite content as a discovery source

    Strategies:

    • Publish two in-depth guides per month on core business finance topics
    • Build a “First-Year Finance” email course for new business owners
    • Optimise the top 20 existing articles for featured snippets and people-also-ask

    Measures: Organic sessions | Keyword rankings | Email course subscribers | Content-attributed enquiries | Average position for target terms

    These examples are deliberately varied in scope and industry — but the structure is identical. That’s the point of using the OGSM template: the framework travels across any marketing function without losing coherence.

    How to Run Your Monthly Marketing Strategy Review Using Your OGSM

    Writing the marketing OGSM is the easy part. Using it to actually run marketing is where most teams fall short.

    Set a monthly review rhythm. In each review, work through your OGSM top to bottom:

    Objective check: Is the team’s work this month clearly oriented toward the Objective? If the answer is “sort of,” something is drifting.

    Goals check: Track each Goal against target. For any Goal that’s behind, name the cause — not the symptom. “MQL volume is down 15% because our paid channel underperformed, which is because we haven’t refreshed our ad creative since March” is a useful diagnosis. “MQL volume is down” is not.

    Strategies check: Are your Strategies still the right choices? Markets move. If a Strategy is no longer generating results after a fair trial, make the decision to change it — explicitly, in the OGSM — rather than quietly deprioritising it while it clutters the plan.

    Measures check: Is each Measure moving in the right direction? Which Measures are leading indicators of success, and are they pointing the right way? If your content strategy is working, organic traffic should be climbing before MQL volumes follow. The lag matters.

    For teams just getting started, the OGSM review also connects to how you cascade the marketing plan into team-level work. Read how to cascade OGSM through your organisation to see how the content team, demand gen team, and brand team each build their own OGSM from yours.

    OGSM for Marketing Teams: What to Do Next

    Building a marketing OGSM is a half-day exercise if you have the company OGSM in front of you. Here’s the sequence:

    1. Pull out the company Strategies that marketing owns
    2. Write the marketing Objective — one sentence, qualitative, ambitious
    3. Set 3–5 Goals with numbers and timelines
    4. Choose 3–5 Strategies — the real choices, not a laundry list of tactics
    5. Define Measures with owners, baselines, and targets
    6. Review monthly and update quarterly

    The one-page constraint is the discipline. If your marketing plan doesn’t fit on a single page, it’s not strategic — it’s operational. OGSM forces you to make choices, and choice is what strategy actually is.

    Rock on.

  • 20 OGSM Objectives Examples (And How to Write One That Actually Works)

    20 OGSM Objectives Examples (And How to Write One That Actually Works)

    The most important part of the OGSM to get right is the Objective statement. And that’s more difficult than you’d think.

    The Objective in an OGSM is the single qualitative statement at the top of your strategy — the directional, aspirational sentence that describes where your organization is going, without a number attached.

    Good OGSM objectives examples sound like: “Become the most trusted fitness brand in the US” or “Lead the shift from product supplier to solutions partner.” They’re inspiring, durable, and number-free. If yours has a percentage or a deadline in it, you’ve written a Goal, not an Objective.

    In this article we explore what makes a good Objective statement for OGSM, what mistakes to avoid, and provide you with 20 examples for inspiration.

    What Makes an OGSM Objective (And What Doesn’t)

    The Objective is the hardest line to write in an OGSM. Not because the thinking is complex — but because most leaders have been trained to make everything measurable, and an Objective is deliberately not measurable. That friction is where mistakes happen.

    A strong OGSM Objective has three characteristics:

    • Qualitative. No numbers, percentages, or time-bound targets. Those belong in your Goals row.
    • Directional. It points your organisation toward a specific destination — not a distance.
    • Durable. The best Objectives remain meaningful for three to five years, even as the Goals beneath them are refreshed annually.

    Think of the Objective as the answer to: “What kind of company are we becoming?” It’s not about what you’ll achieve by a date. It’s about what you’re building toward.

    The Number One OGSM Objective Mistake

    I’ve reviewed hundreds of OGSMs, from start-ups to global businesses. The error I see most often: writing a Goal in the Objective row.

    Here’s what that looks like:

    “Grow our customer base by 30% and achieve £50m revenue by 2027.”

    That’s two Goals masquerading as an Objective. The moment you attach a number, a percentage, or a deadline, you’ve left Objective territory.

    Here’s how that same strategic intent looks written correctly:

    “Become the first-choice brand for small business owners in our region.”

    The direction is identical. The inspiration is higher. And it gives your leadership team room to set stretching Goals beneath it — which is exactly how OGSM is supposed to work.

    If you find yourself reaching for a spreadsheet while writing your Objective, stop. Go qualitative. Save the measurement for the Goals row where it belongs.

    20 OGSM Objectives Examples by Industry

    These examples span seven sectors. Use them as inspiration — adapt the language to your market, your team, and your ambition. What matters is that each is directional, qualitative, and motivating. Not a single number in sight.

    Retail

    Retail Objectives tend to focus on brand position, customer loyalty, or market leadership. The challenge is avoiding vague mission-statement language and keeping genuine strategic direction.

    1. Become the destination of choice for sustainable everyday essentials in the UK.
    2. Transform from a transactional retailer into a trusted lifestyle brand that customers return to weekly.
    3. Establish ourselves as the most convenient and personalised shopping experience on the high street.

    SaaS / Technology

    In SaaS, Objectives often reflect a shift in how the product is perceived — from tool to platform, from feature to workflow anchor.

    1. Be the platform that growing teams trust to run their operations from day one.
    2. Shift from a point solution to the central nervous system of our customers’ workflows.
    3. Become the most recommended project management tool in the professional services sector.

    Professional Services

    Consultancies and agencies anchor Objectives in reputation and trust — because that’s ultimately what drives their pipeline.

    1. Be recognised as the go-to partner for mid-market companies navigating transformation.
    2. Build a reputation as the most trusted advisory firm in our niche — where clients come for the hard conversations.
    3. Become the consultancy that ambitious founders call first.

    Manufacturing

    Manufacturing Objectives frequently signal a strategic shift — from commodity supplier to valued partner, or from local player to category leader.

    1. Lead our category through a shift from product supplier to full-service solutions partner.
    2. Build a manufacturing operation that competitors benchmark themselves against.
    3. Establish our brand as synonymous with precision and reliability in European industrial markets.

    Non-Profit / Social Enterprise

    Non-profit Objectives should be grounded in mission — but ambitious. Avoid the trap of writing something that sounds like your existing service description.

    1. Become the most trusted voice for marginalised young people in our city.
    2. Transform from a service provider into a movement that changes how our community thinks about mental health.
    3. Build the most accessible and impactful financial literacy programme in our region.

    Healthcare

    Healthcare Objectives often focus on patient experience, workforce quality, or the shift from reactive to proactive care models.

    1. Create a patient experience that people in our community actively recommend to each other.
    2. Lead the shift from reactive care to proactive health management in our practice network.
    3. Become the employer of choice for clinical talent in our county.

    Education

    Education Objectives focus on outcomes, access, and institutional reputation — the things that define an organisation’s identity over a generation.

    1. Build an institution where every student — regardless of background — believes they can succeed.
    2. Become the regional benchmark for innovative, employer-linked curriculum design.

    How to Stress-Test Your OGSM Objective

    Once you’ve written a draft, run it through these three questions before it gets locked into the framework:

    1. Is it qualitative?

    Remove every number and deadline. Does it still make sense? Does it still have direction? If yes, you’re in the right territory. If stripping the numbers leaves you with nothing, you’ve written a Goal, not an Objective.

    2. Does it have a three-to-five-year feel?

    Your Objective should be stable while your Goals evolve annually. If it would feel outdated in 12 months, it’s too tactical. If it could mean anything indefinitely, it’s too generic. Aim for the sweet spot: specific enough to have a point of view, broad enough to outlast your next planning cycle.

    3. Does it move your team?

    Read it aloud. Does it land? Would a new joiner immediately understand what kind of organisation this is trying to become? A great Objective creates a feeling, not just a direction. If you get blank stares, rewrite it.

    Most first drafts don’t pass all three. That’s normal — the Objective usually takes the longest to settle in any OGSM I’ve worked on.

    Objectives vs Goals: The One-Line Distinction

    An Objective tells you where you’re going. A Goal tells you whether you’ve arrived.

    “Become the most trusted brand in our market” is an Objective. “Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 72 by Q4 2027” is the Goal that proves it. They are two different instruments doing two different jobs, and conflating them is how strategies lose their structure.

    If your OGSM has numbers in the Objective row and aspirational language in the Goals row, you’ve flipped them. Swap them back and the whole framework will feel more coherent immediately.

    For a deeper look at how Goals and Measures work together — and the confusion that arises when they’re treated as the same thing — see OGSM Goals vs Measures: What’s the Difference?.

    Writing Your Own OGSM Objective

    Start with this prompt: “In three to five years, we want to be known as the company that ________.”

    Fill in the blank without using a number. Strip the jargon. Run it through the three stress-test questions above. Then check it against your complete OGSM guide to make sure your Goals, Strategies, and Measures build coherently beneath it.

    If you want to see complete OGSM examples across all four components in action, 30 OGSM Strategy Examples is a good next stop. And for the Measures row — the other notoriously tricky component — OGSM Measures Examples walks you through it in the same format.

    Rock on.