Rock Your Strategy

Tag: strategy execution

  • How to Run Your OGSM Quarterly Review

    How to Run Your OGSM Quarterly Review

    Most OGSM plans quietly fall apart between reviews — not because the strategy was wrong, but because no one built a reliable ritual for interrogating it.

    Running an OGSM quarterly review means gathering your leadership team for 60–90 minutes to assess four things: whether your Objective still reflects your ambition, whether your Goals are on track, whether your Strategies are working, and whether your Measures are telling the truth. You review Dashboard Measures to check the scoreboard and Action Plan Measures to understand why. Then you decide: stay the course, adjust tactics, or trigger a full re-plan.

    In this article you’ll get a step-by-step facilitation guide — what to prepare before the meeting, the exact four questions to ask the room, how to update your OGSM documents correctly, and a 60–90 minute agenda you can run this quarter.

    What should you prepare before the quarterly review?

    The quality of your quarterly review is determined before anyone walks into the room. If you arrive with stale data and no pre-read, you’ll spend the first 30 minutes catching up instead of deciding.

    Prepare at least 48 hours before the session:

    • Update your Dashboard Measures. Pull actual vs. target for every Goal. If a measure is amber or red, be ready to explain the gap — not defend it.
    • Update your Action Plan Measures. Each Strategy should have measurable milestones. Gather those actuals too.
    • Prepare a one-page summary. A single document showing the current state of every Objective, Goal, Strategy, and Measure gives the room a shared starting point. Our OGSM template is built for exactly this.
    • Flag the outliers in advance. Don’t walk through everything line by line. Pre-identify the two or three items that need a real conversation and make sure everyone knows what they are.
    • Send the pre-read 24 hours before. Your team should arrive oriented, not overwhelmed. If people are still reading the summary when the meeting starts, you’ve already lost 20 minutes.

    The facilitation job gets much easier when the facts aren’t in dispute before you begin.

    What are the four questions to ask the room?

    The quarterly review is a structured interrogation of your OGSM. These four questions give the session its spine. Ask them in order.

    1. Is our Objective still the right ambition? Quarterly reviews rarely change the Objective — but you should ask. Has the competitive environment shifted? Has something internally changed the scope of what’s possible or necessary? If the answer is yes, flag it for a full re-plan (more on that below). If not, confirm it and move on quickly.

    2. Are our Goals on track? Goals are your quantified targets — revenue, market share, retention, whatever you committed to. Go Dashboard Measure by Dashboard Measure. Green means proceed with a brief acknowledgement. Amber means diagnose. Red means decide. Don’t skip the green ones — a quick confirmation that something is working builds team confidence and keeps the energy right before you hit the difficult conversations.

    3. Are our Strategies producing results? This is where most reviews get shallow. Strategy is how you intend to win — not a list of activities. The question is not “did we do the work?” but “is this approach generating the outcomes we expected?” Look at your Action Plan Measures here. If the activities are happening but the results aren’t following, your Strategy may be wrong — and that’s a different problem than your team underperforming.

    4. What decisions do we need to make today? Every quarterly review must close with explicit decisions, not vague intentions. Resources reallocated? Strategy retired? New initiative approved? Write them down and assign owners before you leave the room. If you leave without decisions, you held a status update, not a strategy review.

    How do you update Dashboard Measures versus Action Plan Measures?

    This is one of the most common points of confusion in OGSM practice, so let’s be precise.

    Dashboard Measures live at the Goal level. They tell you whether you’re on track to achieve your Objective via your Goals. These are typically lagging or leading indicators — monthly revenue, customer NPS, pipeline coverage, retention rate. You update them with actuals and compare against target. A Dashboard Measure tells you that there’s a problem.

    Action Plan Measures live at the Strategy level. They track whether your Strategies are being executed effectively — things like number of new partnerships activated, conversion rate changes from a specific initiative, or features shipped against a roadmap commitment. These tell you why you may be on or off track at the Goal level.

    The rule is simple: when a Dashboard Measure turns red, go immediately to the corresponding Action Plan Measures. The cause of the gap is almost always there. For a deeper look at how these two measure types work together and how to set them up correctly, read our guide to the OGSM Measures Column.

    Update both sets of measures before the meeting. Update the document formally after — with the decisions and any adjusted targets recorded against the relevant measures.

    When should a quarterly review trigger a full re-plan?

    Most quarterly reviews should end with small adjustments: tweak a Strategy, reallocate budget, retire an initiative that isn’t generating results. That’s healthy OGSM practice.

    A full re-plan is warranted when:

    • The Objective is no longer valid. A market shift, acquisition, or significant internal change has made the original ambition wrong or irrelevant.
    • Multiple Goals are structurally off track. Not a bad quarter, but a pattern that suggests the targets were wrong or the underlying business model has changed.
    • Core Strategies are clearly failing. Not just slow — genuinely not working, with no credible line-of-sight to recovery in the remaining period.
    • A critical assumption has been invalidated. Every Strategy is built on assumptions. If a core assumption has been proven wrong, the Strategy resting on it is suspect.

    Be honest here. Continuing to execute a plan everyone in the room knows is broken is more expensive than re-planning. Trigger the re-plan early and you’ll have better options. Waiting until the annual review because “we committed to this” just compounds the cost.

    What does a 60–90 minute quarterly review agenda look like?

    Keep the agenda tight. Quarterly reviews fail when they sprawl into all-day workshops. Here’s a structure that works for most leadership teams:

    0:00–0:10 — Open and orient (10 min) Confirm everyone has reviewed the pre-read. Note the key items flagged for discussion. Set the decision-making expectation: you’re leaving with explicit calls, not actions to investigate.

    0:10–0:30 — Dashboard review (20 min) Walk through each Goal and its Dashboard Measure: actual vs. target, trend, owner commentary. Mark green, amber, or red as you go. Keep green items brief.

    0:30–0:50 — Strategy deep dive (20 min) Focus only on amber and red Dashboard items. For each one, interrogate the Action Plan Measures. What’s driving the gap? Is the Strategy still valid, or does it need to change?

    0:50–1:10 — Decisions and adjustments (20 min) What changes? Who owns it? Are any Strategies being retired or replaced? Is a full re-plan needed? Every decision gets an owner and a due date before you move to the next one.

    1:10–1:20 — Close and next steps (10 min) Assign follow-up actions. Confirm the date and format of the next review. If you’re unsure how often you should be running these sessions, our article on OGSM review cadence covers the full annual rhythm and when to deviate from it.

    That’s a quarterly review that sharpens your strategy rather than just reporting on it. The difference between teams that execute well and teams that drift is usually this: the ones who execute have a meeting they can’t avoid where the facts are on the table and decisions have to be made. Build that meeting, run it well, and your OGSM becomes a live tool rather than a document that ages in a shared drive.

    Rock on.

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

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

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

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

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

    Why AI Makes a Good Strategy Auditor

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

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

    What You Need Before You Start

    Before running an AI strategy audit, gather:

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

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

    The Five-Part AI Strategy Audit

    Part 1: Objective Clarity Test

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

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

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

    Part 2: Goal Integrity Check

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

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

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

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

    Part 3: Strategy Stress Test

    Paste your Strategies and use this prompt:

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

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

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

    Part 4: Measures Audit

    Paste your Measures and use this prompt:

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

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

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

    Part 5: Review Meeting Preparation

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

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

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

    How to Use the Output

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

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

    Running the Audit Quarterly

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

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

    What AI Can’t Do

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

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

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

    Ready to Audit Your Strategy?

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

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

  • 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.

  • OGSM for Non-Profits: How to Build a One-Page Strategy When Your Mission Is the Bottom Line

    OGSM for Non-Profits: How to Build a One-Page Strategy When Your Mission Is the Bottom Line

    Most strategy frameworks are designed to help companies succeed. But what if your organisation is non-profit?

    OGSM works exceptionally well for non-profits, because it gives you a single page that translates your mission into concrete goals, clarifies your programme and fundraising priorities, and gives your board something they can actually use to hold leadership accountable.

    If your current strategic plan is a 40-page document that nobody reads, OGSM is the antidote. This article explores what makes non-profit organisation strategies unique and how to adapt the OGSM approach to suit your organisation.

    Why Non-Profit Strategic Plans So Often Fail

    I’ve sat in rooms with non-profit leaders who are brilliant at their mission and completely exhausted by their strategy process. They’ve spent months producing a beautiful bound document — and by the time it’s printed, it’s already out of date.

    The problem isn’t commitment. It’s format. Traditional strategic plans for non-profits are designed to satisfy funders and boards, not to guide daily decisions. They’re too long, too vague, and too rarely reviewed. Nobody can tell you on a Tuesday afternoon what the top three priorities are this quarter.

    The result? Strategy happens at the senior leadership level and stops there. Programme staff, fundraising teams, and volunteers operate on instinct rather than shared direction.

    Why OGSM Works for Mission-Driven Organisations

    OGSM — Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures — was designed to fit on one page. That constraint is a feature, not a limitation. It forces you to make choices.

    For non-profits, that discipline is especially valuable. You are almost always resource-constrained. You have more good ideas than capacity, more causes worth funding than money to fund them. OGSM forces the question: what are we actually prioritising this year?

    The one-page format also makes it boardroom-friendly. A trustee with a full-time job elsewhere can read it in five minutes and come to a meeting prepared. That changes the quality of your governance conversations entirely. For a deeper look at how OGSM works as a framework, start with our complete OGSM guide.

    How to Adapt Each OGSM Element for a Non-Profit Context

    OGSM adapts to the non-profit world well, but you need to think through each element carefully. Here’s how to frame them.

    Objective: Anchor It to Mission

    Your Objective is your one-sentence statement of strategic ambition for the next one to three years. For a non-profit, this should sit right at the intersection of your mission and your current phase of growth.

    Avoid vague aspirations like “make a difference in our community.” Write something that tells you when you’ve succeeded: “Become the leading provider of food security support in the Greater Manchester region, sustainably funded and recognised by local authorities as an essential service.”

    That’s a real objective. You can test every strategic decision against it.

    Goals: Mix Impact and Sustainability

    Goals are the four to six quantified outcomes that define success. This is where non-profits often make a critical mistake — they write only mission impact goals and ignore financial sustainability.

    You need both. A food bank that reaches 10,000 families but runs out of unrestricted reserves in eighteen months has not succeeded. Your goals should reflect that tension honestly:

    • Reach 10,000 unique households with food support by December 2026
    • Maintain at least 6 months’ unrestricted reserves at all times
    • Grow individual donor base by 40% over two years
    • Achieve 85% volunteer retention year-on-year
    • Secure 3 multi-year statutory funding relationships

    Notice the mix: programme reach, financial health, fundraising pipeline, operational resilience. That’s a complete picture.

    Strategies: Programme Priorities AND Income

    Strategies are the choices you’re making about how to achieve those goals — typically three to six statements. For non-profits, your strategies should cover two areas: programme delivery and income generation.

    Programme strategies might include expanding your referral network with GP surgeries, launching a weekend distribution model, or building a volunteer training programme.

    Income strategies are equally critical: developing a corporate partnership programme, launching a major donor campaign, or applying for a specific statutory funding stream. If your OGSM only covers the work you do and ignores how you fund it, it’s incomplete.

    Measures: The Metrics That Tell You If It’s Working

    Measures are your leading and lagging indicators — the dashboard that tells you if your strategies are on track before you reach year-end.

    For non-profits, strong Measures typically include:

    • Donor retention rate (month-on-month, not just annual)
    • Programme reach (beneficiaries served per month)
    • Volunteer engagement (active volunteers vs. registered)
    • Unrestricted income as a % of total income (financial resilience indicator)
    • Grant pipeline value (forward visibility on income)
    • Referral conversion rate (if partnerships are a strategy)

    For more inspiration on building a strong measures dashboard, see our OGSM measures examples guide.

    What Does an OGSM Look Like for a Non-Profit?

    Here’s what a completed OGSM might look like for a mid-sized community food bank.

    Objective: Be the trusted food security safety net across the city, sustainably funded and embedded in every major referral network by the end of 2027.

    Goals:

    • Serve 8,000 unique households annually by end 2026, 12,000 by end 2027
    • Unrestricted reserves: minimum 6 months at all times
    • Individual donors: grow from 1,200 to 2,000 by December 2026
    • Volunteer retention: 80%+ annually
    • 4 active multi-year grant relationships

    Strategies:

    • Build a GP and social worker referral network covering 90% of local practices
    • Launch a weekend and evening distribution shift to serve working families
    • Develop a Friends of [Foodbank] individual giving programme with tiered benefits
    • Build a corporate volunteering programme targeting 10 local employers
    • Apply to National Lottery Community Fund for a 3-year core cost grant

    Measures:

    • Households served per month (target: 650+)
    • New referral partners added per quarter (target: 8+)
    • Donor retention rate (target: 65%+)
    • Monthly individual giving income (target: £8,000+ by Q4)
    • Unrestricted reserve level (reviewed monthly)
    • Active corporate volunteering relationships (target: 5 by year-end)

    That OGSM fits on one page. Every member of staff and every trustee can read it and understand exactly what success looks like.

    How to Present Your OGSM to the Board

    One of the biggest wins of OGSM for non-profits is what it does to your board meetings. Here’s a 20-minute agenda slot that works:

    Distribute the OGSM (in advance) — it’s one page, so there’s no excuse for trustees not to have read it.

    5 minutes: Measures update — RAG status each measure. No narrative, just numbers.

    10 minutes: Strategic discussion — pick the measures in amber or red and ask: “What are we missing? What’s the right response?”

    5 minutes: Decisions and actions — capture any changes to strategy or resources required.

    That’s it. Governance done.

    How Do You Get Started with OGSM in a Non-Profit?

    Here’s how to move from zero to OGSM in your organisation.

    Step 1: Get the leadership team in a room. You need your executive director, head of programmes, and head of fundraising (or equivalent). Half a day is enough. Come with your mission statement, last year’s accounts, and your current programme plans.

    Step 2: Draft the Objective and Goals first. Don’t start with Strategies — that’s where teams get stuck defending territory. Start with shared ambition. Agree on what success looks like in 2–3 years before you debate how to get there.

    Step 3: Use a template and iterate. Your first OGSM won’t be perfect. Write it anyway. Get it in front of your board and review it quarterly. The discipline of the review is where the real value lives. Download a free OGSM template to get started.

    OGSM for non-profits isn’t a compromise or a simplified version of “real” strategy. It’s a planning tool that respects your mission, your constraints, and your board’s time. One page. Clear trade-offs. A dashboard you actually review.

    Rock on.

  • How to Cascade OGSM Through Your Organisation (Step by Step)

    How to Cascade OGSM Through Your Organisation (Step by Step)

    You created a strategy for your business but have the feeling that each team is pulling in a different direction? That’s where cascading comes in.

    Cascading OGSM means translating your company-level Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures into aligned plans at division, team, and sometimes individual level — so every part of the business is pulling in the same direction. You start at the top, lock in the corporate OGSM, then work downward: each team builds its own OGSM that directly supports the level above it.

    Done right, it’s the cleanest alignment tool in strategic planning. Done badly — or not done at all — it’s how ambitious strategies die quietly in middle management. This article provides you with the step-by-step approach to ensure you do it right.

    Why Most OGSM Implementations Stop at the Top (and Fail)

    Most organisations treat OGSM as a senior leadership exercise. The CEO and their direct reports gather, build a corporate OGSM, declare victory, and expect the strategy to somehow permeate through dozens of teams who’ve never seen the thing. It doesn’t work.

    I’ve seen this happen in companies of every size. The corporate plan looks brilliant. It gets presented at the all-hands with a nice deck. Then it lands on a department head’s desk with a one-line email: “Here’s the company strategy — please align your team.” Three months later, every team is still doing exactly what it always did.

    The problem isn’t the OGSM. The problem is that nobody built the next level down.

    A strategy that lives only at the top is a wish list. Cascade is what turns it into execution.

    What Does a Full OGSM Cascade Actually Look Like?

    A proper cascade doesn’t stop at the executive suite. It travels through the organisation in layers, each one more specific and operational than the last.

    Level 1 — Company OGSM: Set by the CEO and senior leadership team. This is the master plan — the 1–3 year Objective for the whole business, with ambitious but measurable Goals, three to five Strategies, and the Measures that prove it’s working. If you’re new to the framework, start with what OGSM actually means before cascading it.

    Level 2 — Division OGSM: Each division (Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance, Product) builds its own OGSM. Every element must connect directly to the company-level OGSM. The division’s Objective usually picks up one of the company Strategies and makes it its own mandate.

    Level 3 — Team OGSM: Within each division, individual teams (demand gen, customer success, fulfilment, content) build their own OGSMs — connecting upward to the division plan. This is where strategy becomes day-to-day decision-making.

    Level 4 — Individual goals (optional): For smaller teams or high-accountability cultures, individual contributors can align their quarterly objectives to the team OGSM. This level works best in companies with mature performance review rhythms.

    Level Who owns it Connects to
    1 — Company CEO / Senior leadership team Board / shareholders
    2 — Division Divisional VP or Director Company OGSM
    3 — Team Team lead / Manager Division OGSM
    4 — Individual Contributor Team OGSM

    The rule is simple: every OGSM must be traceable upward. If you can’t draw a line from a team-level Strategy to a company-level priority, that Strategy doesn’t belong in the plan.

    Step-by-Step: How to Build a Department-Level OGSM from the Company Plan

    Once your company-level OGSM is set and signed off, here’s how to cascade it at each level below.

    Step 1: Share the company OGSM — all of it. Every team lead needs to read the full company OGSM before they build their own. Not a summary. Not a slide. The actual plan. The Strategies are the most important section: department-level OGSMs almost always find their focus there.

    Step 2: Identify which company Strategies your division owns. A Marketing division might own “Grow brand awareness in new markets” and “Increase lead volume by 40%.” Operations might own “Reduce cost-to-serve by 15%.” Each division takes ownership of the company Strategies that fall squarely within their sphere of influence. If a Strategy is shared across divisions, agree on who leads and who supports — before anyone starts writing.

    Step 3: Write the division Objective. The Objective is an inspirational, qualitative statement. It should feel like a natural child of the company Objective — same energy, narrower scope. If the company Objective is “Become the most trusted supplier in the UK market,” the Marketing Objective might be “Build a brand that makes us the obvious first call for procurement directors.”

    Step 4: Set Goals that feed the company scoreboard. Division Goals must connect to company Goals. If the company has a revenue Growth Goal of £50m, the Sales division’s Goal might be “Generate £60m in qualified pipeline.” The logic: if every division hits its Goals, the company hits its Goals. That line of sight has to be visible and tested, not assumed.

    Step 5: Define Strategies that are division-specific. Here’s where real thinking happens. Division Strategies are not paraphrases of company Strategies — they’re the specific choices that division is making to hit its Goals. “Expand into the NHS procurement channel” is a real Marketing Strategy. “Improve our deck” is not a Strategy; it’s a task.

    Step 6: Set Measures with clear ownership. Every Measure needs an owner, a baseline, and a target. If no one is responsible for tracking a Measure, it won’t get tracked. At division level, Measures often feed directly into the company-level scorecard.

    Step 7: Repeat for team level. Once the division OGSM is solid, each team lead runs the same process — connecting their OGSM to the division plan rather than the company plan. The cascade deepens without losing the thread.

    If you want a framework to work from as you go, the OGSM template at each level saves you from starting with a blank page.

    What Has to Line Up — and What Can Your Team Own?

    Cascade doesn’t mean copy-paste. Teams need room to build plans that reflect their operational reality. Here’s what’s non-negotiable and what isn’t.

    Must align (non-negotiable):

    • The Objective must support the level above — it should feel like a natural continuation of the parent plan’s ambition
    • At least one Strategy must directly address a company-level priority
    • Measures must include at least one metric that feeds the parent OGSM’s scoreboard

    Can flex:

    • The tone and framing of the Objective
    • Additional Strategies that address local issues (talent gaps, tooling, process debt) even if they’re not in the parent OGSM — as long as they don’t contradict it
    • Team-specific Measures that are supplementary, not replacements

    The alignment test: if a member of the senior leadership team read your team’s OGSM, could they trace a clear line from your plan up to the company plan within two minutes? If yes, you’re aligned. If they’d have to guess, rebuild.

    Worked Example: A Three-Level Cascade at Brindley & Co

    Let’s make this concrete. Meet Brindley & Co, a mid-sized B2B services business in the compliance sector.

    Company OGSM (Level 1)

    • Objective: Become the dominant provider of compliance services in the UK financial sector
    • Goals: £40m ARR by year 3 | 85% client retention | NPS above 65
    • Strategies: Deepen relationships with Tier 1 banks | Launch a digital self-service platform | Build thought leadership in FCA-regulated markets
    • Measures: Annual recurring revenue | Gross churn rate | Net Promoter Score | Content-sourced pipeline

    Marketing Division OGSM (Level 2)

    • Objective: Make Brindley & Co the go-to name in compliance content and community
    • Goals: Generate 250 MQLs per month | Drive 40% of pipeline from inbound | Grow email list to 25,000
    • Strategies: Publish weekly long-form compliance guides | Host quarterly roundtables for compliance directors | Build an SEO programme targeting FCA search terms
    • Measures: MQL volume | Content-attributed pipeline value | Email subscriber count | Organic traffic growth

    Notice: the Marketing Objective picks up the company Strategy “Build thought leadership in FCA-regulated markets” and makes it a division mandate. The Marketing Goals connect to the company pipeline and retention goals. Alignment visible, no guesswork required.

    Content Team OGSM (Level 3)

    • Objective: Own the digital conversation around FCA compliance for financial services professionals
    • Goals: Publish 4 long-form articles per month | Rank top 3 for 10 priority search terms | Achieve 25% email open rate
    • Strategies: Build a content calendar anchored to the FCA regulatory release schedule | Develop a “compliance explainer” series for senior decision-makers | Optimise existing content for featured snippets
    • Measures: Articles published per month | Keyword rankings | Email open rate | Time-on-page

    The Content Team’s SEO strategy exists because Marketing chose SEO as a division strategy, because the company chose thought leadership as a corporate strategy. That line of sight is cascade working. You can see it in real-world OGSM examples across different sectors — the logic is the same even when the context changes.

    What Are the Most Common Cascade Mistakes?

    I’ve watched smart leaders break cascade in the same ways, repeatedly. Here’s the full list.

    Building in isolation. Division heads disappear into a workshop and write their OGSMs without properly referencing the corporate plan. You end up with five impressive-looking documents that don’t connect. Always share the company OGSM before anyone starts writing at the next level down.

    Cascading Goals but not Strategies. Teams adopt the company’s revenue targets without making the strategic choices about how to hit them. Numbers without direction aren’t strategy — they’re pressure. Cascade the Strategies first; the Goals follow.

    Making lower-level OGSMs too granular. A team OGSM should look like a scaled-down version of the corporate plan, not a project plan. If you’re listing 40 tasks under Strategies, you’ve gone too far. Strategies in a team OGSM should still be big choices, not activities.

    Skipping the alignment conversation. Cascade is not just document creation — it’s dialogue. Division heads need to present their OGSMs to the CEO. Team leads need to present to their division heads. That conversation catches misalignment before it hardens into nine months of wasted effort.

    Treating cascade as a one-time event. OGSMs should be reviewed quarterly. If the company shifts a Strategy mid-year, the cascade needs to be refreshed. A stale cascade actively misleads teams — they’ll be executing against priorities that no longer exist.

    Measuring the wrong things at the wrong level. Each level of cascade should track leading indicators of the level above’s lagging indicators. If the company tracks ARR, Marketing should track pipeline. If Marketing tracks pipeline, the Content Team should track MQL quality. Align the metrics hierarchy as carefully as you align the strategy hierarchy.

    How Do You Stop the Cascade from Going Stale?

    Building the cascade is the hard work. Maintaining it is a discipline.

    Set a quarterly OGSM review rhythm at every level. Division heads review their OGSM with the CEO; team leads review with their division heads. Treat it like a board meeting — prepared data, honest assessment of what’s working, and clear decisions about what changes.

    When company Strategies shift (and they will — markets change, competitors move), communicate upward and downward. Team leads need to know when priorities have moved. Executive leadership needs to hear when team-level data is suggesting a Strategy isn’t working. Cascade isn’t a top-down broadcast; it’s a two-way alignment system.

    For the operational side, a structured OGSM template with built-in hierarchy links makes it easier to see alignment across levels without chasing documents across folders. At scale, that infrastructure matters.

    How to Cascade OGSM: The Summary

    Cascade OGSM through your organisation by:

    Locking in the company OGSM first — cascade can’t start with a draft

    Using the 4-level model: Company → Division → Team → Individual

    Following the step-by-step process at each level, starting with Strategies

    Applying the alignment rules: some elements must connect up, others can flex

    Running the alignment conversation before finalising each level’s plan

    Reviewing the full cascade quarterly — and refreshing it when the company plan changes

    The difference between a company that executes strategy and one that talks about it is almost always found at this level. The corporate OGSM is the easy part. Getting it into every team’s hands — and into their priorities — is where execution is actually won.

    Rock on.

  • How to Cascade an OGSM Across Departments (With Examples)

    How to Cascade an OGSM Across Departments (With Examples)

    Most organisations that struggle with strategy execution don’t have a problem with their top-level OGSM. They have a cascade problem.

    To cascade an OGSM across departments, each team builds their own sub-OGSM by taking one of the company’s Strategies as their Objective. Their Goals, Strategies, and Measures then flow down from that. Done right, every department’s OGSM is a direct expression of the corporate OGSM — not a separate plan bolted on the side.

    This article explores how to do it — and what to avoid.

    What Does It Mean to Cascade an OGSM?

    Cascading means taking a strategy from a higher level and making it the starting point for planning at the next level down. In OGSM terms, the company’s Strategies become department Objectives.

    Think about it this way. Your corporate OGSM has an Objective (where you’re going), Goals (the quantified targets that define success), and three to five Strategies (the choices about where to focus). Each Strategy is a statement of intent: “We will grow through new channel partnerships” or “We will reduce operating costs by automating manual fulfilment.”

    Each of those Strategies needs an owner. That owner — typically a department or business unit — then builds their own OGSM using the Strategy as their Objective. Their Goals quantify what success looks like for that department. Their Strategies describe how they’ll get there. Their Measures track progress.

    The result is a connected hierarchy of plans, each one directly traceable back to the corporate direction. No department is off doing their own thing. Every team can see exactly how their work connects to the overall strategy.

    What Are the Three Types of OGSM Cascade?

    Not every cascade is the same. I’ve seen three patterns used in practice, and the right one depends on your organisation’s structure and planning horizon.

    Vertical cascade (by department or business unit)

    This is the most common approach. You take the corporate OGSM and decompose it by function. Sales, Marketing, Operations, Product — each department takes ownership of the Strategy that most closely matches their remit and builds a sub-OGSM from there.

    Vertical cascade works well in functional organisations where departments have clear ownership of outcomes. If your corporate Strategy is “expand into enterprise accounts,” that becomes the Sales team’s Objective. Sales then sets its own Goals (number of enterprise accounts won, average contract value), its own Strategies (target industry verticals, invest in account-based marketing), and its own Measures.

    Horizontal cascade (across process chains)

    Sometimes a Strategy cuts across functions rather than sitting neatly within one. “Reduce customer onboarding time from 30 days to 7 days” is an Objective that involves Sales, Product, IT, and Customer Success simultaneously. No single department owns it outright.

    In this case, a horizontal cascade creates a cross-functional OGSM shared by all the teams involved. Each team’s contribution is captured in the Measures column, so accountability is visible and distributed. This is harder to manage — you need a clear process owner — but it’s essential for strategic priorities that don’t respect org chart lines.

    Time-based cascade (annual into quarterly)

    The third type isn’t structural, it’s temporal. You take your annual OGSM and break it into quarterly sub-OGSMs. The annual Goals become the targets; the quarterly OGSMs describe the specific actions and milestones that will get you there each quarter.

    I use this approach with leadership teams that find the annual OGSM too abstract for day-to-day decision-making. Quarterly OGSMs keep the team focused on near-term work while remaining anchored to the year’s Goals and Measures.

    What Does a Cascaded OGSM Look Like in Practice?

    Let me show you a worked example. I’ll keep it simple but realistic.

    Corporate OGSM (abbreviated)

    • Objective: Become the market-leading provider of sustainable packaging in Europe by 2028.
    • Goals: Revenue €150M by FY28; Net Promoter Score ≥ 65; >40% market share in key segments.
    • Strategies: S1: Grow through direct enterprise accounts in DACH and Benelux. S2: Launch a certified compostable product line by Q3. S3: Reduce production waste by 25% to fund investment.

    Three departments each take ownership of one Strategy.

    Sales OGSM (from S1)

    • Objective: Grow through direct enterprise accounts in DACH and Benelux.
    • Goals: 40 new enterprise contracts by FY27; €60M revenue from enterprise by FY27; 90% renewal rate.
    • Strategies: Focus outbound on manufacturing and food & beverage; build a partnership channel with two regional distributors; deploy account-based marketing for top 20 targets.
    • Measures: Pipeline value, contracts signed per quarter, renewal rate, partner revenue.

    Product OGSM (from S2)

    • Objective: Launch a certified compostable product line by Q3.
    • Goals: Four SKUs to market by Q3; 95% certification pass rate; COGS within 15% of existing line.
    • Strategies: Partner with two material suppliers already in certification pipelines; run a 90-day pilot with three beta customers; align packaging design to existing brand guidelines.
    • Measures: Certification milestone tracker, beta feedback scores, COGS per unit, Q3 launch date.

    Operations OGSM (from S3)

    • Objective: Reduce production waste by 25% to fund investment.
    • Goals: Waste down from 18% to 13.5% by end of FY27; €2M in savings reinvested into R&D.
    • Strategies: Implement lean production review at two main facilities; renegotiate supplier contracts to reduce off-spec deliveries; automate quality control on Line 4.
    • Measures: Waste % by facility, monthly cost savings, supplier defect rate, Line 4 throughput.

    You can see what’s happening here. Every department Objective is a direct lift from a corporate Strategy. Every department’s success contributes directly to the corporate Goals. The strategy is connected — not fragmented.

    For a structured template to build this out, our OGSM template walks you through each level step by step. And if you want a deeper grounding in how the framework works from first principles, the complete OGSM guide is the right place to start.

    What Are the Most Common Cascade Mistakes?

    I’ve helped organisations cascade OGSMs across dozens of departments. The same mistakes come up every time.

    Copying company Strategies verbatim

    When you ask a department to “just cascade their part,” the path of least resistance is to copy the corporate Strategies into their own OGSM and call it done. It feels compliant. It isn’t. Each department’s OGSM should reflect how they will deliver the higher-level Strategy — their own choices, their own approach. If the Sales OGSM’s Strategies look identical to the corporate Strategies, nobody has actually thought about execution.

    Turning cascade into a rubber-stamp exercise

    This happens when cascade is imposed top-down without real dialogue. Leadership hands down the corporate OGSM, departments fill in the template, and nobody questions whether the split makes sense. The cascade produces paper alignment, not real alignment. The better approach is a working session where departments discuss which corporate Strategy they’re best placed to own, where the overlaps are, and what they’ll need from other teams to succeed.

    No common review cadence

    A cascaded OGSM only works if the connected OGSMs are reviewed together. If the corporate OGSM is reviewed quarterly but department OGSMs are reviewed monthly — or never — the cascade breaks down. Misalignment creeps back in. Build a single review rhythm that runs from department to corporate level, so the connections stay live.

    Forgetting that some strategies are cross-functional

    Not every corporate Strategy belongs to one department. Treating a cross-functional priority as if it belongs to one team creates silos and finger-pointing when delivery falls short. Identify these upfront and build horizontal accountability into the Measures rather than hoping one team carries the load.

    Ready to Start Your OGSM Rollout Across Teams?

    How to cascade an OGSM is genuinely one of those things that sounds straightforward and trips people up in execution. The framework is simple: each department takes a corporate Strategy as their Objective and builds down from there. The hard part is the conversation — who owns what, how you handle cross-functional priorities, and how you build a review cadence that keeps the whole structure honest.

    Start at the top. Make sure your corporate OGSM is solid and your Strategies are clear and distinct. Then bring your department heads together and work through the OGSM cascade departments exercise as a team — not as a form-filling exercise. The difference shows.

    Working at a smaller scale? OGSM for small business covers how to apply the same cascade logic without the enterprise overhead.

    Rock on.

  • Why Most Strategies Fail (And Three Things You Can Do About It)

    Why Most Strategies Fail (And Three Things You Can Do About It)

    Most strategies fail not because leaders are not smart enough, but because they mistake aspiration for direction.

    Strategies fail because they leave room for ambiguity, mistake action for progress, and lack integration into operational processes.

    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. I have spent years working with leadership teams across industries, from fast-scaling start-ups to established mid-market businesses, and the same three failure patterns show up every time. Not occasionally. Reliably. The good news: all three are fixable.

    What Is the Real Reason Why Most Strategies Fail?

    Ask most leadership teams what their strategy is and you will get a recitation of values, vision, and ambitions. “We want to be the most trusted provider in our market.” “We are committed to exceptional customer experience.” “We are focused on sustainable growth.”

    None of that is strategy.

    Strategy is a decision. Specifically, it is a decision about what you will do — and more importantly, what you will not do. When a strategy cannot tell you what to say no to, it cannot guide behaviour. Teams cannot prioritise. Middle managers make competing calls. Leaders wonder why execution keeps fragmenting.

    I sat in a room last year with a leadership team of twelve people. I asked them each to write down the top three strategic priorities for the year. I got eleven different answers. Nobody was lying. Nobody was being difficult. They had all attended the same strategy presentation six months earlier. But the strategy was written in a way that let every person hear something different — because it had been designed to inspire, not to decide.

    The real problem is not ambition. Ambition is useful. The problem is ambiguity disguised as direction. When everything feels strategic, nothing is.

    The fix: Force the trade-off. Take your current strategy statement and ask: “What does this require us to stop doing, reduce, or decline?” If you cannot answer that, you do not have a strategy — you have a preference. The OGSM framework is one of the most effective tools I know for translating aspiration into specific, testable decisions. It requires you to name Goals that can be measured and Strategies that are genuinely choices — not just activities dressed up as direction.

    Why Do Teams Confuse Busyness With Progress?

    The second failure is subtler — and far more common than most leaders want to admit.

    Teams are busy. Genuinely busy. Calendars are full. Projects are running. Slide decks are being built. And yet six months after the strategy was announced, nothing strategically significant has changed.

    This happens because organisations confuse activity with progress. There is no feedback loop connecting what people do day-to-day to the outcomes the strategy is supposed to achieve. No-one knows whether all that busyness is actually moving the needle — or just keeping people occupied and comfortable.

    I worked with a leadership team who were convinced their growth strategy was on track. Pipeline numbers were up. Sales activity was high. Everyone was running. When we mapped their KPIs back to strategic intent, we found they were measuring effort — calls made, proposals sent, meetings attended — rather than strategic outcome: revenue from new customer segments, retention in the target market, margin improvement. Their measurement system was accidentally tracking the wrong thing. It rewarded hustle and reported it as strategy.

    This is extraordinarily common. And it is lethal because it feels fine right up until the board asks for results — at which point twelve months of momentum turns out to have been motion, not progress.

    The fix: Build a feedback loop between action and outcome. For every strategic priority, define a leading indicator (something you can measure now that predicts the outcome you want) and a lagging indicator (the result you are ultimately trying to achieve). Review these regularly — not annually. If your strategy has measures that only tell you how you did last year, you are navigating with a rear-view mirror.

    This is exactly where a structured approach like OGSM earns its keep. It forces you to define Measures for every Strategy — not just hope that action translates to outcome. You can download the OGSM template to see how that structure works in practice. Having the right measures changes what conversations happen at the leadership level — which is where strategy either lives or quietly dies.

    Why Does Strategy Live in a Deck Instead of Driving Decisions?

    This third failure pattern is the one I find most frustrating — because it is almost entirely avoidable.

    Strategy gets announced, often with great fanfare. There is a leadership away-day, a well-designed presentation, a town-hall. People leave feeling energised. And then the deck lands in a SharePoint folder no-one opens, and the organisation goes back to doing what it has always done — because nothing about the operating system of the business has actually changed.

    Strategy only drives behaviour when it is integrated into the rhythm of how the business runs. Not referenced once a quarter. Not reviewed at the annual planning cycle. Integrated into how decisions get made every single week.

    When a team brings a resource request to a leadership meeting, does it get tested against strategic priorities? When a new partnership opportunity arrives, does the team have a clear framework for deciding whether it fits the strategy or distracts from it? When performance reviews happen, are people being measured against strategic contribution — or just output?

    If the answers to those questions are no, the strategy is not running the business. It is decorating a wall somewhere.

    The fix: Integrate strategy into your weekly and monthly operating cadences. The most effective leadership teams I have worked with have a standing item on their weekly meeting agenda: “What are we saying no to this week?” It takes five minutes. It keeps the strategy present. Over time, it reshapes culture — because the message lands clearly that strategy is not a document. It is a discipline.

    This is also where having a clean, one-page strategy summary matters. If your strategy fits on a single page in plain language, people can refer to it and hold each other to it. If it lives in a 40-slide deck with small print and executive summaries, it will not survive contact with operational reality.

    What Is the Common Thread Behind Every Strategy Failure?

    All three failure patterns share the same root: strategy is treated as a communication exercise rather than an operational system.

    Leaders create a strategy, communicate it, and expect behaviour to change. But behaviour changes when decisions change. Decisions change when there are clear criteria, feedback loops, and a rhythm of accountability woven into how the business actually operates.

    The leaders who execute strategy well share three habits:

    • They can articulate their strategy in a single sentence — and specifically what it rules out.
    • They review leading indicators weekly, not just lagging ones quarterly.
    • They use the strategy to make — and refuse — real decisions, not just to guide presentations.

    None of this is complicated. But all of it is harder than writing a slide deck. Which is why so few organisations actually do it.

    What Should You Do Next?

    If this resonates — the aspiration that never quite lands, the busyness that never quite becomes progress, the deck that quietly dies in a shared folder — I wrote more about it in The Strategy Lie, a business fable about exactly this pattern.

    It goes deeper on why most strategy fails at the execution layer, and what the leaders who get it right do differently.

    Follow The Strategy Lie’s progress →

    Rock on.

  • OGSM for Small Business: The Complete Strategic Planning Guide (With Real Examples)

    OGSM for Small Business: The Complete Strategic Planning Guide (With Real Examples)

    Most strategic planning frameworks were built for companies with dedicated strategy teams, quarterly board reviews, and the kind of budget that covers three-day off-sites. If you run a business with 5 to 200 people, that’s not your world.

    OGSM — Objective, Goals, Strategies, Measures — gives small businesses a one-page strategy framework that forces real prioritisation and runs on a monthly review habit, without the overhead of OKRs or a Balanced Scorecard. This guide covers everything you need to write your first OGSM: the framework explained in plain language, three real-world examples, a step-by-step build process for small businesses, and the review cadence to make it stick.

    OGSM for small business is different. This guide is the most complete practical resource you’ll find on using OGSM as a small business owner, founder, or general manager. By the time you finish reading, you’ll have everything you need to write your first OGSM — or fix the one that isn’t working.

    Table of Contents

    1. Why Do Small Businesses Need a One-Page Strategy?
    2. What Is OGSM, and How Does It Work for Small Business Owners?
    3. How Do You Build Your First OGSM Step by Step?
    4. What Do Real OGSM Examples for Small Businesses Look Like?
    5. How Do You Run an OGSM Review?
    6. What Tools and Templates Do You Need for OGSM?
    7. What Are the Most Common OGSM Mistakes Small Businesses Make?
    8. FAQ

    Why Do Small Businesses Need a One-Page Strategy?

    Here’s the strategy planning mistake I see most often in small businesses: the owner spends a weekend writing a 20-page strategic plan, presents it to the team on a Monday, and by Friday nobody can remember what was in it.

    The plan isn’t bad. The format is.

    Long documents don’t drive execution. They sit in a folder on Google Drive, opened maybe twice before the next planning cycle. Meanwhile, the business runs on gut feel, whatever’s urgent that week, and the priorities of whoever shouts loudest. That’s not a strategy — it’s organised chaos.

    Why Complex Frameworks Fail at Small Business Scale

    OKRs, Balanced Scorecards, and similar frameworks are genuinely powerful at the right scale. The problem is they’re expensive to run. OKRs require a dedicated quarterly cycle with cascading objectives through layers of the organisation. The Balanced Scorecard needs someone who understands the four perspectives, a way to measure leading indicators, and regular calibration across departments. When you have 12 people and everyone has a day job, that overhead kills adoption.

    I’ve watched founders burn out trying to implement OKRs as if they were running Google. The system becomes the work instead of supporting it.

    What OGSM Solves

    OGSM — Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures — was originally developed at Procter & Gamble as a way to fit an entire business strategy on a single page. That constraint is the feature, not the bug.

    For small businesses, that single page does three things frameworks like OKR can’t easily do at this scale:

    • Alignment at a glance. Every person in your business can see the whole strategy, understand where they fit, and hold themselves accountable without a manager explaining the cascade every quarter.
    • Honest prioritisation. When everything has to fit on one page, you’re forced to choose. Most small businesses don’t have a strategy problem — they have a prioritisation problem. OGSM fixes that.
    • Low-friction review. You don’t need a strategy function to run a monthly OGSM check-in. A 30-minute team meeting against a shared document is enough.

    If you want the deeper comparison between OGSM and other frameworks, read our OGSM vs OKR guide — but for most small businesses, OGSM is the right starting point.

    What Is OGSM, and How Does It Work for Small Business Owners?

    OGSM stands for Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures. If you’ve never used it before, here’s what each element actually means — and how they fit together.

    Objective

    Your Objective is a single sentence describing what your business is trying to achieve in the next 12 to 36 months. It’s qualitative, directional, and inspiring. It’s not a revenue target — that comes later.

    Think of it as your “why we’re pushing hard right now” statement. A good small business Objective sounds like:

    “Become the most trusted supplier of commercial kitchen equipment in the Pacific Northwest.”

    One sentence. No metrics. If your Objective needs a paragraph to explain, it’s too complicated.

    Goals

    Goals are the 3–5 measurable outcomes that define what success looks like for your Objective. This is where numbers enter the OGSM.

    Goals are specific, time-bound, and measurable. They make your Objective concrete. For the kitchen equipment business above:

    • Grow annual revenue to $4.2M by end of year
    • Achieve net promoter score of 60+ among commercial clients
    • Expand product range to cover 90% of commercial kitchen categories
    • Retain 85% of accounts year-over-year

    If you hit all four of those, you’re probably the most trusted supplier in the region. That’s the test: do your Goals prove your Objective was achieved?

    Strategies

    Strategies are how you’ll achieve your Goals. For each Goal, you identify 2–4 Strategies — the specific approaches, initiatives, or capabilities you’ll build.

    Strategies answer the question: “What are we actually going to do?” They’re more directional than to-do lists but more concrete than vague intentions.

    • Goal: Grow revenue to $4.2M → Strategies: Launch outbound sales programme targeting hospitality groups; build preferred supplier agreements with three commercial kitchen designers; expand service contract offering to existing accounts.

    Measures

    Measures are how you’ll know your Strategies are working. Each Strategy should have at least one lead indicator (a measure of activity you control) and ideally a lag indicator (a measure of outcome).

    This is where OGSM gets sharp. Most strategies fail not because they’re wrong but because nobody ever checks whether they’re working. Measures force that discipline.

    Strategy Lead Measure Lag Measure
    Outbound sales programme Calls made per week New accounts opened per quarter
    Preferred supplier agreements Agreements signed Revenue from partner channel

    For real-world examples of strong lead and lag Measures across different business types, our OGSM measures examples guide is worth bookmarking. For a deeper explanation of how Goals and Measures differ — and why confusing them is the most common OGSM mistake — read our OGSM Goals vs Measures guide.

    The Worked Example: Coastal Home Cleaning Co.

    Let me pull this together with a fictional small business so you can see how it looks in practice.

    Business: Coastal Home Cleaning Co. — 18-person residential cleaning service, 3 years old, founder wants to expand to a second city within two years.

    OGSM:

    Objective: Become the premium home cleaning brand in our region, known for reliability and trust, ready to scale to a second market.

    Goals:

    1. Reach $1.8M annual revenue by end of Year 1
    2. Maintain 4.8+ star average across all review platforms
    3. Build a waitlist of 50+ qualified residential clients in Target City B
    4. Reduce staff turnover to below 20% annually

    Strategies (selected):

    • For Revenue Goal: Launch referral programme targeting existing 5-star accounts; introduce quarterly deep-clean packages at premium price point
    • For Expansion Goal: Hire city lead for Target City B by Q2; run localised digital ads in Target City B from Q3
    • For Retention Goal: Introduce team lead structure and performance bonus tied to client satisfaction scores

    Measures:

    • Weekly: referral sign-ups; new bookings from ads
    • Monthly: revenue vs. target; review score; staff turnover YTD

    That’s a complete OGSM. It fits on one page, every team member can understand it, and you can review it in 20 minutes.

    How Do You Build Your First OGSM Step by Step?

    Building your first OGSM takes longer than maintaining one, but even a first attempt shouldn’t take more than a few focused hours — or a single 90-minute workshop. Here’s the process.

    Step 1: Write Your Objective

    Start here. Don’t try to write Goals first or you’ll anchor too quickly on today’s numbers and miss the bigger picture.

    Ask yourself: what does winning look like for this business in the next 12–24 months? Write a sentence that captures that ambition. It should be inspiring enough to motivate people but honest enough to be credible.

    Avoid objectives that are really Goals in disguise. “Reach £2M revenue” is a Goal. “Be the go-to accountancy firm for tech startups in London” is an Objective.

    If you get stuck, try the formula: [Verb] + [Who/What] + [Qualifier].

    • “Become the most recommended [category] in [geography]”
    • “Build [business type] that [distinctive position]”

    Step 2: Write 3–5 Goals

    Now make it measurable. For each dimension of your Objective, identify one concrete Goal. Most small businesses need Goals in three to five areas:

    • Revenue / financial performance
    • Customer satisfaction / retention
    • Operational capability
    • Team / people
    • Market position / growth

    Don’t write more than five. Five Goals means five things you’re truly committed to. More than that and you don’t have priorities — you have a wish list.

    Each Goal needs a number and a timeframe. “Grow revenue” isn’t a Goal. “Grow revenue to $2.5M by December 31” is.

    Step 3: Identify 2–4 Strategies Per Goal

    For each Goal, ask: what do we need to do differently to achieve this? Strategies are not business-as-usual activities — they’re the moves that make the difference.

    A useful stress-test: if you kept doing everything you’re currently doing but added nothing new, would you hit this Goal? If yes, you don’t need a Strategy there — just execution. Strategy is for the gaps.

    Write each Strategy as a clear action phrase: “Launch X,” “Build Y,” “Partner with Z,” “Discontinue A.”

    Limit yourself to 2–4 Strategies per Goal. Small businesses don’t have the bandwidth for more.

    Step 4: Assign Measures With Owners

    For each Strategy, set a lead and lag measure, and put someone’s name next to it. Unowned Measures don’t get tracked.

    Lead measures matter more than most people think. Revenue is a lag measure — by the time it moves, the ship has already turned. Your lead measures tell you whether the ship is turning now. For a sales strategy, the lead might be “number of discovery calls per week.” For a retention strategy, it might be “NPS survey sent and response rate.”

    Name the owner. In a small business, this is usually straightforward: the founder, a team lead, or a manager who will stand up in the review meeting and report the number.

    The 90-Minute OGSM Workshop Agenda

    If you want to build your OGSM with your team (recommended), here’s a workshop format that works:

    Time Activity
    0–15 min Framing: where we are now, what’s changed, what’s at stake
    15–30 min Draft Objective: each person writes one, group votes and refines
    30–50 min Goals: generate candidates, pressure-test with “does this prove the Objective?”
    50–70 min Strategies: breakout by Goal owner, rapid-fire, filter to 2–4 each
    70–85 min Measures: assign lead/lag for each Strategy, name owners
    85–90 min Review the full OGSM on one page: does it hang together?

    You don’t need a facilitator. You need a shared document, a timer, and someone willing to kill ideas that don’t belong on the page.

    What Do Real OGSM Examples for Small Businesses Look Like?

    Three complete examples across different sectors. These are fictional businesses, but the numbers and strategies reflect what I’ve seen in real-world small business planning contexts.

    Example 1: Thornwood Partners (Professional Services — Management Consulting, 12 staff)

    Objective: Become the consulting partner of choice for founder-led businesses going through their first significant growth transition.

    Goals:

    1. Grow fee income to £1.4M by year-end
    2. Achieve 70%+ revenue from repeat or referred clients
    3. Launch signature 90-day growth accelerator programme by Q2
    4. Build a team capable of running two parallel engagements without founder involvement

    Strategies:

    • Fee income: Increase average engagement value by tiering service offering; pursue 6 new logo clients per quarter
    • Repeat/referral: Introduce structured client review at 30/60/90 days; launch referral incentive for active clients
    • Programme launch: Develop IP and deliver beta cohort with 5 clients; collect case studies for launch marketing
    • Team capability: Hire senior consultant H1; build delivery playbook for top 3 service lines

    Measures (selected): Weekly pipeline review; monthly revenue; NPS post-engagement; programme NPS; senior hire date.

    Example 2: Drift & Co. (E-commerce — Sustainable Activewear, 6 staff + contractors)

    Objective: Build a profitable direct-to-consumer brand with a loyal community of customers who buy more than once.

    Goals:

    1. Reach $900K annual revenue with 30% gross margin
    2. Grow repeat purchase rate to 35%
    3. Build email list to 25,000 active subscribers
    4. Launch in two new product categories without compromising hero line margin

    Strategies:

    • Revenue/margin: Reduce reliance on paid social by 20%; negotiate better COGS through bulk order commitments
    • Repeat purchase: Build post-purchase email sequence; launch loyalty programme with early access perk
    • Email list: Run quarterly lead magnet campaigns; partner with 10 micro-influencers on co-created content
    • New categories: Test two categories with limited drops before committing to stock; gate expansion on hero margin holding above 32%

    Measures (selected): Weekly: email sign-ups, ad ROAS, inventory turns. Monthly: revenue, GM%, repeat rate, list size.

    Example 3: The Salt Room (Hospitality — Boutique Hotel, 22 staff)

    Objective: Position The Salt Room as the destination coastal stay in our region, with strong direct booking and a reputation that outlasts any single review platform.

    Goals:

    1. Achieve 80% average annual occupancy (up from 67%)
    2. Grow direct bookings to 60% of total (currently 38%)
    3. Maintain TripAdvisor and Google rating at 4.7+
    4. Launch events programme generating £80K incremental annual revenue

    Strategies:

    • Occupancy: Target shoulder season with “slow travel” packages; build corporate retreat offering
    • Direct bookings: Launch loyalty programme; invest in SEO and email capture on website; reduce OTA commission by shifting incentives
    • Rating: Introduce guest experience check-in call at 24 hours; empower front desk to resolve issues on the spot up to £50
    • Events: Partner with local food/drink producers for quarterly events; test monthly supper club format

    Measures: Weekly: bookings by channel, occupancy forecast. Monthly: occupancy, direct booking %, review scores, events revenue.

    How Do You Run an OGSM Review?

    The OGSM you write in January is only as good as the reviews you run in February, March, and beyond. The review rhythm is where most small businesses fall down — not the planning.

    The Monthly OGSM Check-In (30 minutes)

    Once a month, bring together whoever owns the Measures and run through the numbers. Keep it short. The agenda:

    1. RAG status (5 min): For each Goal, is it green (on track), amber (risk), or red (off track)?
    2. Lead measure review (10 min): Are activity levels where they should be? If a lag measure is red, check the leads first.
    3. Blockers (10 min): What’s preventing progress? Who needs to make a decision?
    4. Next 30 days (5 min): Confirm priority actions per Strategy.

    No presentations. Pull up the OGSM document, go row by row. If something is amber or red, talk about it. If it’s green, move on.

    The Quarterly Review (90–120 minutes)

    Every quarter, do a proper review. This is where you decide whether your Strategies are still the right ones — not just whether you’re executing them.

    The monthly tells you how fast you’re running. The quarterly tells you whether you’re running in the right direction.

    Agenda additions vs. monthly:

    • Is each Strategy still valid, or has the market shifted?
    • Do Goals need adjusting based on what you’ve learned?
    • Any new Strategies to add? Any to retire?

    This is also the moment to celebrate wins. Small businesses underdo recognition. If a Goal was hit, mark it.

    The Annual Reset

    Once a year, start fresh. Don’t just roll your existing OGSM forward. Ask the harder question: is the Objective still right?

    Markets change. Businesses evolve. The Objective you wrote 12 months ago may no longer be the right ambition — or you may have achieved it and need a new one.

    The annual reset is a full workshop. Bring your full leadership team (even if that’s just you and two others), block a half-day, and rebuild from the Objective down.

    What Tools and Templates Do You Need for OGSM?

    You don’t need software to run OGSM. A shared Google Doc or spreadsheet works perfectly for most small businesses with fewer than 50 people.

    That said, the right template makes a real difference to first-time adoption. We have a free OGSM template designed specifically for small businesses — structured so your team can fill it in during the workshop, with built-in Measures tracking for monthly reviews. Download the free OGSM template here.

    When You Don’t Need Software

    If you have fewer than 30 people, a shared document and a monthly meeting is enough. Don’t buy strategy software to run a one-page framework. The overhead will kill the habit before it forms.

    When Software Starts to Help

    Once you have multiple teams or departments, each with their own strategies and measures, a dedicated tool makes alignment easier. You can cascade the top-level OGSM into team-level plans, link Measures to dashboards, and run reviews asynchronously.

    At that point, you’re moving toward the enterprise OGSM model — and our main OGSM guide has what you need.

    What Are the Most Common OGSM Mistakes Small Businesses Make?

    These are the mistakes I see specifically in small business OGSM attempts — different from the errors enterprise teams make.

    1. Writing the Objective Last

    Most small business founders start with Goals (because they’ve been thinking about revenue targets for months) and then reverse-engineer an Objective. The result is an Objective that’s really just a restatement of the Goals in vague language.

    Start with the Objective. It should be hard to write. If it comes easily, it’s probably not ambitious enough.

    2. Confusing Strategies With Tasks

    “Update the website” is not a Strategy. “Build direct booking capability to reduce OTA dependency” is. Strategies describe the approach — the how-we-win logic. Tasks sit inside Strategies. If your OGSM looks like a project plan, you’ve gone one level too deep.

    3. Not Assigning Measure Owners

    “We’ll track revenue monthly” is not a Measure with an owner. “Maria tracks revenue monthly, reports in team standup by the 5th” is. Without ownership, Measures don’t get reported, which means Strategies don’t get reviewed, which means the OGSM is just a document.

    4. Too Many Goals

    I’ve seen small business OGSMs with 9 Goals. That’s not a strategy — it’s a bucket list. With 9 Goals, you have no priorities. Everything is equally important, which means nothing is. Three to five Goals is the discipline that gives OGSM its power.

    5. Treating the OGSM as a Once-a-Year Exercise

    Writing the OGSM is not the work. Running the reviews is the work. A perfect OGSM that’s reviewed twice a year is less valuable than a decent OGSM that gets reviewed monthly by an engaged team. Build the review habit before you worry about OGSM perfection.

    6. Hiding the OGSM From the Team

    Some founders treat the OGSM as a leadership document and share a watered-down version with the team. That kills the alignment benefit entirely. If you’re worried about a Goal being sensitive (e.g. acquisition planning), leave it off the shared version — but share as much as you can. The team has to know what winning looks like to help you win.

    Frequently Asked Questions About OGSM for Small Business

    How long does it take to build an OGSM for the first time? Budget 90 minutes with your team for the first draft, plus 30 minutes of solo refinement after. Don’t try to make it perfect on day one. A 70% OGSM reviewed monthly beats a 100% OGSM that sits in a drawer.

    How often should I update my OGSM? Review monthly. Adjust Strategies and Measures quarterly if needed. Reset the Objective and Goals annually, or when something significant changes in the business or market.

    What’s the difference between OGSM Goals and KPIs? Goals are the finite outcomes that prove your Objective was achieved — you set them once per cycle and they don’t change month to month. KPIs (or Measures, in OGSM language) are the ongoing tracking metrics that tell you whether your Strategies are working. One Goal may have multiple Measures. For more on this distinction, see our OGSM Goals vs Measures guide.

    Can I use OGSM for just one department or team? Yes. Team-level OGSMs work well when they cascade from a company-level OGSM. The team’s Objective should support one or more of the company’s Goals. If your team’s OGSM has nothing to do with the company’s Objectives, you’re not aligned — you’re just busy.

    What if I’m a solo founder — is OGSM still useful? Yes, but simplify the format. You don’t need 5 Goals and 4 Strategies each. One page with a clear Objective, 3 Goals, and 2–3 Strategies per Goal is enough. The value is still the forced prioritisation and monthly review habit.

    Is OGSM better than OKRs for small businesses? For most small businesses with fewer than 50 people, yes — OGSM is simpler to implement and easier to sustain. OKRs require quarterly cycles and often a dedicated champion to avoid drifting. If you want a detailed comparison, read our OGSM vs OKR guide.

    Your strategy doesn’t need to be complex to be good. It needs to be clear, owned, and reviewed. OGSM gives small businesses exactly that — a one-page framework that fits how you actually work, forces real prioritisation, and builds the review habit that turns planning into execution.

    Start with the Objective. Make it honest. Then build from there.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM Dashboard Examples: How to Track Your Strategy Week by Week

    OGSM Dashboard Examples: How to Track Your Strategy Week by Week

    The best OGSM dashboard is a simple visual that shows you — at a glance — whether your Measures are green, amber, or red, who owns each one, and when it was last updated. You don’t need expensive software. A Google Sheet, a PowerPoint slide, or even a whiteboard wall can do the job. The goal is to make progress (or the lack of it) impossible to ignore.

    Why Most OGSM Implementations Stall at the Tracking Stage

    You built the OGSM. You ran the workshop, aligned the leadership team, printed it on a nice slide. And then… nothing. Six weeks later, nobody’s looking at it.

    This is the most common failure point in OGSM execution — not the strategy itself, but the absence of a tracking rhythm. Without a dashboard that makes it painfully obvious whether each Measure is on track, the OGSM becomes a once-a-year exercise rather than a live management tool. I’ve seen this in organisations of every size. The strategy is sound. The execution tools are non-existent.

    The problem isn’t that leaders don’t care. It’s that nobody built a simple visual to anchor the weekly conversation. A dashboard removes the friction of having to ask “where are we?” It puts the answer in the room before the question is asked.

    The fix isn’t a fancier tool. It’s a visible, consistently-updated display of your Measures that forces the conversation every single week.

    What a Good OGSM Dashboard Actually Shows

    Before you look at examples, understand what your dashboard needs to communicate. A useful OGSM tracking dashboard surfaces four data points for each Measure:

    • RAG status — Red, Amber, or Green. No percentages. No nuance. Just a colour that tells you whether this Measure needs attention this week.
    • Trend — Is it getting better or worse compared to last week? An up arrow, down arrow, or flat line is enough.
    • Owner — One name. Not a team, not a department. One human who is accountable for moving it.
    • Last reviewed — The date this Measure was last discussed in a meeting. Stale dates are a red flag that your review rhythm is slipping.

    That’s it. Four data points per Measure. If your dashboard shows more than that, you’re adding complexity that slows down the review conversation and gives people reasons to debate methodology instead of fixing problems.

    For a deeper look at how to design your Measures in the first place, read how to write OGSM measures that actually get tracked.

    3 OGSM Dashboard Examples

    Example 1: The RAG Spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel)

    This is the default for most teams and the right starting point.

    Layout: One row per Measure. Columns: Measure name | Target | Current value | RAG status | Trend | Owner | Last reviewed | Notes.

    How it looks: Use conditional formatting to colour the RAG status cell automatically — green if you’re at or above 90% of target, amber if you’re between 70–89%, red if you’re below 70%. The colour-coding does the work. You scan the column and instantly know where to focus. No interpretation required.

    Who it’s for: Any team that already lives in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Zero extra cost, zero setup friction. Export it as a PDF and paste it into your weekly agenda so the data is in front of everyone before the meeting starts.

    Illustrator note: A clean table with six rows (one per Measure), a vivid RAG colour in column 4, and simple up/flat/down trend arrows in column 5. Use a muted grey background for the header row. Keep the font clean and the layout uncluttered.

    Example 2: The One-Page Slide Dashboard (PowerPoint or Google Slides)

    When you’re presenting to a leadership team or board, a single slide works better than a spreadsheet.

    Layout: Four quadrants — one per Strategy. Inside each quadrant, list the 2–3 Measures for that Strategy with their RAG dot and owner initials. At the top of the slide: the Objective in bold, and a single RAG status for the overall OGSM. One slide, total picture.

    How it looks: Think of a 2×2 grid with a header bar. Each cell is a Strategy, labelled clearly. The Measures inside are concise — five to seven words max. A large coloured dot (●) sits to the left of each Measure name.

    Who it’s for: Executive teams who meet weekly or fortnightly and need a single artefact to anchor the conversation. Print it double-sided — OGSM on the front, action log on the back. It’s also the right format for a board update where you have five minutes to communicate strategic health.

    Illustrator note: A clean slide with a bold title bar (“OGSM Dashboard — Week 19”), four coloured quadrant boxes in two columns, and RAG dots beside each Measure name. Minimalist, data-forward. White background, dark text.

    Example 3: The Wall Chart (For In-Person Teams)

    If your team shares a physical office, nothing beats a wall chart you can see from across the room.

    Layout: Print your OGSM on A0 paper (or use a large whiteboard). Use sticky dots — green, amber, red — to mark each Measure’s current status. Add a “last reviewed” date label under each dot using a marker.

    How it looks: A large printed OGSM framework with physical coloured dots stuck on each Measure. The dots are changed during the weekly stand-up. When the whole left column is green, there’s a visual satisfaction that no digital tool replicates. When something goes red, the whole team sees it instantly — no email needed, no login required.

    Who it’s for: Operations teams, manufacturing floors, agile product teams, any group that physically gathers. The wall chart creates social accountability — everyone walking past can see the state of play. It’s also useful for teams that find screen-based meetings draining.

    Illustrator note: A large printed OGSM on an office wall, with circular sticky dots next to each Measure. One person (illustrated from behind) is updating a dot — swapping a red dot for an amber one. Bright, energetic office setting.

    How to Run the Weekly Dashboard Review (5 Steps)

    Having the dashboard means nothing if you don’t use it. Here’s the five-step process I recommend for teams running a weekly strategy review:

    Update before the meeting. Each Measure owner updates their RAG status the morning of the review. No surprises, no data gathering during the call. If data isn’t ready, the status defaults to amber.

    Start with the reds. Open every review on the red Measures only. Greens don’t need airtime. Cap each red discussion at five minutes.

    Identify the single next action. For each red or amber, agree on one action, one owner, one deadline. Write it in the notes column immediately.

    Take five minutes on trend. Even if something is green today, a downward trend is a warning sign. Flag it before it becomes a red.

    Update the “last reviewed” date. This sounds trivial. It isn’t. A date that hasn’t moved in two weeks tells you the review rhythm is breaking down before anyone has to say it out loud.

    The whole review should take 30 minutes or less. If it’s taking longer, you have too many Measures or too many people in the room.

    Common Dashboard Mistakes

    • Tracking activities instead of outcomes. “Delivered 12 training sessions” is not a Measure — it’s a task. Your dashboard should show what changed as a result of those sessions: retention rate, engagement score, time-to-competency.
    • Updating the dashboard retroactively. If owners are backfilling data to make things look green, your RAG status is fiction. The discipline of real-time updates is where most teams fall down. Build it into the meeting ritual, not the prep work.
    • Too many Measures on one dashboard. An OGSM should have 6–10 Measures total across all Strategies. If your dashboard has 25 rows, you’ve confused activity tracking with strategy tracking. Go back to your OGSM framework and cut ruthlessly.

    Get the OGSM Template

    If you’re building your first tracking dashboard, start with a template rather than from scratch. The free OGSM template includes a pre-built RAG spreadsheet with conditional formatting already set up — add your Measures and you’re ready for your first weekly review.

    Rock on.

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

    How to Use OGSM for a 90-Day Sprint Plan

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

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

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

    Why 90 Days Is the Right Unit for Execution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How to Build Your 90-Day OGSM

    Step 1: Start With Your Annual Objective

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

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

    Step 2: Select Your 90-Day Focus Goals

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

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

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

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

    Step 3: Define Your Strategies for This Quarter

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

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

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

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

    Step 4: Set Weekly or Bi-Weekly Measures

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

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

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

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

    Step 5: Review Every Two Weeks

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

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

    A 90-Day OGSM Example

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

    90-Day Focus Goals (Q2):

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

    90-Day Strategies:

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

    Measures (bi-weekly):

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

    When to Use a 90-Day OGSM

    A 90-day sprint plan works best when:

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

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

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

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

    What to Avoid

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

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

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

    The Template Makes It Simple

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