Rock Your Strategy

Tag: strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What do you need before you start?

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

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

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

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

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

    Phase 0: What does the diagnosis actually ask you?

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

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

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

    Then the Five-Answer Test:

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

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

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

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

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

    Phase 1: How does the reality check work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Marlow’s first attempt was typical:

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

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

    After three drafts:

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

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

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

    Phase 3: How do you turn that into goals?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Phase 4: What makes the strategies phase uncomfortable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Phase 5: How do the measures get built?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Phase 6: What does the stress test look for?

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

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

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

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

    Phase 7: How does it get delivered and cascaded?

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

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

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

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

    Phase 8: What happens at the review?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How does saving and resuming work?

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

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

    Frequently asked questions

    How long does it actually take?

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

    Can I use this if I already have a strategy?

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

    Do I need my leadership team in the room?

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

    What if I don’t have baselines for everything?

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

    Will the AI just agree with everything I say?

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

    Can it decide my strategy for me?

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

    What happens after the plan is built?

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

    Is this different from prompting Claude directly?

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

    Where to go from here

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

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

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

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

    Rock on.

  • Why AI Should Facilitate Your Strategy, Not Write It

    Why AI Should Facilitate Your Strategy, Not Write It

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

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

    And it will be worthless.

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

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

    What is AI genuinely good at in a strategy session?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What can AI not do?

    Four things, and each one is load-bearing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Because plausibility is the trap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Who says no?

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

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

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

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

    Why is the discomfort of the strategies phase the point?

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

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

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

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

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

    Where must the human decide?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    An AI strategy audit produces observations, not decisions.

    So what should you actually use AI for?

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

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

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

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

    Rock on.

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

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

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

    Then you sat there.

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

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

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

    What is the OGSM Strategy Builder?

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

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

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

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

    What problem does it actually solve?

    The gap between a template and a process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What happens across the eight phases?

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

    Phase 0 — Set-up and Diagnosis

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

    Phase 1 — Reality

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

    Phase 2 — Objective

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

    Phase 3 — Goals

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

    Phase 4 — Strategies

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

    Phase 5 — Measures

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

    Phase 6 — Stress Test

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

    Phase 7 — Deliver and Cascade

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

    Phase 8 — Review (and this one repeats)

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

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

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

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

    What do you get at the end?

    Three things.

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

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

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

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

    What happens if you have to stop halfway?

    You stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The honest summary

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

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

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

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

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

    Rock on.

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

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

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

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

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

    Why AI Makes a Good Strategy Auditor

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

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

    What You Need Before You Start

    Before running an AI strategy audit, gather:

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

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

    The Five-Part AI Strategy Audit

    Part 1: Objective Clarity Test

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

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

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

    Part 2: Goal Integrity Check

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

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

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

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

    Part 3: Strategy Stress Test

    Paste your Strategies and use this prompt:

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

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

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

    Part 4: Measures Audit

    Paste your Measures and use this prompt:

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

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

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

    Part 5: Review Meeting Preparation

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

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

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

    How to Use the Output

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

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

    Running the Audit Quarterly

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

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

    What AI Can’t Do

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

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

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

    Ready to Audit Your Strategy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. Your Review Meetings Have Become Status Updates

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

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

    2. Nobody Can Summarise the Strategy in One Sentence

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

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

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

    3. Your Measures Are Green but Your Goals Are Red

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

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

    4. You Keep Adding Priorities Without Removing Anything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    9. Ownership of Goals and Strategies Is Unclear

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

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

    10. You’re Measuring Outputs Instead of Outcomes

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

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

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

    What to Do If Several Signs Are Present

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

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

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

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

    A Tool That Makes Off-Track Visible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Can OGSM Work Before You Have Product-Market Fit?

    Yes — with significant caveats.

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

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

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

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

    What Does a Pre-PMF OGSM Actually Look Like?

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

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

    Goals:

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

    Strategies:

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

    Measures:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How Do You Build Your First Pre-PMF OGSM?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What If You Don’t Know Your Objective Yet?

    This is the real test.

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

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

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

    Common pre-PMF blockers to a clear Objective:

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

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

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

    What’s the Alternative at the Very Earliest Stage?

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

    Two simpler tools worth trying first:

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

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

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

    When Should You Graduate to a Full OGSM?

    Watch for three signals:

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

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

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

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

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

    Rock on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What Are Dashboard Measures?

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

    What they look like:

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

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

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

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

    What Are Action Plan Measures?

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

    What they look like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How Do You Tell Dashboard Measures from Action Plan Measures?

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

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

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

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

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

    How Do You Fix Your Measures Column Without Starting Over?

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

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

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

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

    Why Does Getting This Distinction Right Actually Matter?

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

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

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

    Rock on.

  • The Most Common OGSM Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

    The Most Common OGSM Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

    The OGSM template looks deceptively simple — four boxes — and most teams fill it in wrong in exactly the same predictable ways.

    The most common OGSM mistakes aren’t about formatting — they’re about thinking. Most teams fill in the template correctly but miss the logic underneath: one clear Objective, a single measurable Goal, Strategies that genuinely guide decisions, and Measures that tell you whether the strategy is working. Fix the thinking, and the template takes care of itself.

    If you’ve read our complete OGSM guide, you already know what a well-built OGSM looks like. But knowing the framework and executing it cleanly are two very different things. I’ve reviewed hundreds of OGSMs over the years — from scrappy startups to global multinationals — and the same mistakes show up again and again. Here are the seven I see most often, and exactly how to fix them.

    Are you confusing Strategies with Goals?

    This is the mistake that derails more OGSM sessions than anything else. Teams write their Strategies as if they’re Goals — big aspirational statements with no clear direction — or they write their Goal as if it’s a Strategy, detailing how they’ll achieve it before they’ve defined what success looks like.

    Here’s the distinction in plain English: your Goal is the specific, quantifiable outcome you’re aiming for this year. Your Strategies are the few critical choices you’re making about how to get there.

    “Grow revenue by 20%” is a Goal. “Focus exclusively on enterprise accounts in financial services” is a Strategy. “Launch a digital marketing programme” is not a Strategy — it’s a tactic pretending to be one (more on that shortly).

    If your Strategy could have been written by any company in your industry, it’s not a strategy. It needs to reflect a genuine choice — one that implies you’re not doing something else.

    Are your Measures tracking activity instead of outcomes?

    This one is subtle and absolutely kills the usefulness of your OGSM.

    Activity metrics tell you what your team did. Outcome metrics tell you whether it worked. “Number of customer meetings held” is activity. “Pipeline value generated from new customer meetings” is outcome. “Blog posts published per month” is activity. “Organic traffic from target keyword cluster” is outcome.

    I see teams build Measures columns full of activity metrics and then wonder why their OGSM doesn’t feel connected to real performance. It’s because they’re measuring effort, not impact.

    The fix is simple but requires honesty: for every Measure on your OGSM, ask “could we hit this number while the strategy completely fails?” If yes, it’s an activity metric. Find the outcome it’s supposed to drive and measure that instead.

    Your Measures should make you slightly uncomfortable — they should be the honest test of whether your Strategies are actually working.

    Do you have too many Goals?

    OGSM stands for Objective, Goal (singular), Strategies, Measures. Not Goals. One Goal.

    I know — you have a lot of priorities. So does every leadership team I’ve ever worked with. But the discipline of committing to a single, primary Goal for the year is precisely where the OGSM earns its keep. If you have five Goals, you don’t have a strategy — you have a list.

    The Goal should be the one number that tells you, at year end, whether you succeeded. Everything else — margin, customer satisfaction, team engagement — should either roll up into that Goal or show up as Measures: the guardrails that confirm the Goal was achieved the right way.

    When a leadership team pushes back and says “we can’t possibly have just one Goal,” I ask them: if you could only hit one of your five goals, which would it be? That’s your Goal. The rest are constraints or secondary measures.

    Are you cascading your OGSM by copying instead of translating?

    One of the most powerful things about OGSM is how it cascades through an organisation. The executive team’s OGSM becomes the brief that each function uses to build their own. But there’s a mistake I see constantly: teams just copy the parent OGSM and change the header.

    That’s not a cascade. That’s a photocopy.

    When you cascade an OGSM, each team needs to ask: “Given our parent’s Strategies, what is our contribution? What does our team uniquely need to achieve, and what choices do we need to make to deliver it?” The team-level OGSM should look different from the company-level one — different Goal, Strategies specific to that function, Measures that track what that team can actually control.

    If your sales team’s OGSM and your marketing team’s OGSM have the same Strategies, something has gone wrong. See our guide to OGSM measures for examples of how this plays out in practice at the team level.

    Does each Measure have a named owner?

    A Measure without an owner is a wish, not a commitment.

    This is the accountability gap I see in almost every OGSM that’s struggling to get traction. The team agrees on Measures in the planning session, everyone nods, the document gets saved to the shared drive — and then three months later, nobody can tell you where those numbers stand because nobody was specifically responsible for tracking and reporting them.

    Fix it in the planning session itself: before you leave the room, every Measure gets a name next to it. That person is accountable for knowing the number, updating it in your quarterly review, and flagging when it’s off track. It doesn’t mean they’re doing all the work to move the number — it means they’re the one making sure it doesn’t get forgotten.

    Are you setting it and forgetting it?

    This is the OGSM mistake that makes all the others worse.

    An OGSM built in January and reviewed in December isn’t a strategic management tool — it’s an expensive planning exercise. The value of the OGSM is in the quarterly rhythm: stopping to ask “are our Strategies still the right ones?”, “what are our Measures telling us?”, “do we need to adapt?”

    I built the discipline of quarterly OGSM reviews into every leadership team I’ve worked with, and it consistently changes the quality of conversation. Instead of “how are we doing against targets?”, the question becomes “is our strategy working?” Those are very different conversations, and the second one is where the real leadership thinking happens.

    Build your quarterly review into the calendar on day one. Protect it. Use the Measures column as your agenda. If a Measure is green, move fast. If it’s red, dig into whether you have an execution problem or a strategy problem — that distinction matters enormously, and the OGSM is the tool that surfaces it.

    Are your Strategies actually tactics in disguise?

    Strategies that are really just big tactics — this is the OGSM common mistake that makes me wince most often.

    A Strategy should answer the question: “What is the critical choice we’re making about how we compete or operate?” A tactic answers: “What specific action are we taking?” The problem is that tactics masquerade as strategies all the time.

    “Invest in digital marketing” is a tactic. “Own the consideration phase of the buyer journey through content, before competitors engage” is a Strategy. “Hire three enterprise sales reps” is a tactic. “Win by relationship depth rather than price competition” is a Strategy.

    The test I use: if your Strategy still leaves the question “but how will you do that?” unanswered, you’ve got a real Strategy. If it fully describes the execution, it belongs in your project plan, not your OGSM.

    Getting this right takes practice. The first time most leadership teams write Strategies, they come out as tactics. That’s fine — the conversation about the difference is itself valuable. Push through it.

    OGSM common mistakes are almost always thinking mistakes, not template mistakes. The format is simple. The discipline — the honest single Goal, the real Strategies, the outcome Measures, the ownership, the review cadence — that’s what separates teams who use OGSM as a living management tool from those who treat it as an annual ritual. Start with our complete OGSM guide if you’re building from scratch, and use this list as your quality check before you hit publish.

    Rock on.

  • OGSM Measures: The Complete Guide to Dashboards, KPIs, and Action Plans

    OGSM Measures: The Complete Guide to Dashboards, KPIs, and Action Plans

    Most OGSM plans fall apart in the same place.

    OGSM Measures is the column that answers “how will we know if this is working?” — and it contains two distinct sub-elements that most teams never separate: a Dashboard (KPIs and indicators that track whether each Strategy is on track) and an Action Plan (the specific initiatives, owners, and deadlines that execute each Strategy). Done right, Measures turns your OGSM from a strategy document into a live management system — one that tells you, in a single glance, what’s working, what’s stalling, and exactly what to do about it.

    Here you’ll get the complete picture of what the Measures column actually contains, why the Dashboard and Action Plan distinction matters, how to choose KPIs that connect to real strategy, and the exact mistakes that make Measures columns useless. You’ll also see a full worked example for a B2B SaaS company so you can build yours with confidence.

    If you’ve read our overview of the Measures column or worked through the OGSM template, this is the deep-dive companion that covers everything else.

    Table of Contents

    What Does the OGSM Measures Column Actually Contain?

    Not at the Objective. Not at the Goals. Not even at the Strategies. They fall apart in the Measures column — the one element that’s supposed to tell you whether any of it is actually working.

    The Measures column is the most misunderstood, most abused, and most underbuilt part of any OGSM. Practitioners stuff it with vanity metrics they can’t act on, KPIs borrowed from a competitor’s dashboard, or a wall of numbers that nobody reviews. Then they wonder why their OGSM dies in a drawer by February.

    Open up almost any OGSM template — including the ones sold as “complete” — and you’ll see the Measures column described as a single thing: metrics. KPIs. Numbers.

    That’s wrong. Or rather, it’s incomplete in a way that causes real operational damage.

    The Measures column is not a metrics column. It’s a management column. It contains two structurally different sub-elements that serve two completely different purposes:

    1. The Dashboard — indicators that tell you whether a Strategy is on track
    2. The Action Plan — the specific initiatives, projects, and tasks that execute the Strategy

    Most teams build one or the other. The few who build both often stack them on top of each other as if they’re the same thing. They’re not. Conflating them is the single most common reason OGSM Measures columns become useless decoration.

    Before we go further: if you’re new to OGSM altogether, start with our complete OGSM guide to get grounded in the full framework. Come back here for the deep dive on Measures.

    The Two Jobs of the Measures Column

    Think about what a Strategy actually needs to be managed:

    Job 1 — Tracking: You need signals that tell you, on an ongoing basis, whether your Strategy is working. These are leading and lagging indicators. They answer: Is this Strategy moving us in the right direction?

    Job 2 — Executing: You need a concrete set of actions that implement the Strategy. Plans, owners, deadlines. They answer: What are we actually doing to move the needle?

    The Dashboard handles Job 1. The Action Plan handles Job 2. You need both.

    Without the Dashboard, you’re flying blind — executing away without knowing if anything is working.

    Without the Action Plan, you have targets but no engine to hit them.

    This two-part structure is what separates OGSM from simpler frameworks like OKRs, where Measures and Actions are often collapsed into “Key Results” and left ambiguous. OGSM forces you to be explicit about both.

    What Is the Difference Between the Dashboard and the Action Plan?

    Let’s break these down precisely.

    The Dashboard

    The Dashboard is your monitoring system. For each Strategy in your OGSM, your Dashboard contains a small set of KPIs (typically 2–4) that reflect whether that Strategy is working.

    What it includes:

    • The indicator name and definition
    • Current baseline value
    • Target value (linked to the Goal it serves)
    • Measurement frequency (weekly, monthly, quarterly)
    • Data owner (who pulls the number and confirms accuracy)

    What it does NOT include:

    • Tasks or projects
    • Vague aspirations (“improve NPS”)
    • Metrics you can’t act on

    The Dashboard is passive in the sense that it reflects reality — it doesn’t create it. A good Dashboard tells your leadership team, in a 60-second glance, whether each Strategy is working or stalling. It enables intelligent conversation at your OGSM review cadence without requiring anyone to hunt through spreadsheets.

    Think of it like a car dashboard. The speedometer doesn’t make the car go faster — it tells you how fast you’re going so you can decide whether to press the accelerator or ease off.

    Characteristics of a good Dashboard indicator:

    • Measurable with current tools — You can actually pull this number today, not “once we set up the new reporting system.”
    • Owned — One person is responsible for the accuracy of this number.
    • Sensitive to the Strategy — If the Strategy is working, this number moves. If it’s not, it stays flat or deteriorates.
    • Actionable — When the number goes red, you know what lever to pull.
    • Leading or lagging with intent — Lagging indicators confirm what happened; leading indicators predict what’s coming. A great Dashboard includes both.

    Example Dashboard for a customer retention Strategy:

    Indicator Baseline Target Frequency Owner
    Monthly churn rate 3.2% < 1.5% Monthly VP Customer Success
    NPS (Promoters only) 28 50+ Quarterly Head of CX
    Product adoption score (feature X) 34% 65% Monthly Product Analytics

    The Action Plan

    The Action Plan is your execution system. It’s the list of specific initiatives, projects, and milestones that will cause the Strategy to work. If the Dashboard tells you how you’re doing, the Action Plan tells you what you’re doing.

    What it includes:

    • Initiative name (clear and specific)
    • Owner (person accountable for delivery)
    • Deadline or target quarter
    • Current status (not started / in progress / complete / at risk)
    • Dependency flags (what this blocks or is blocked by)

    What it does NOT include:

    • Vague activities (“increase customer focus”)
    • Aspirations with no owner
    • Everything you could possibly do — only the priority actions for this Strategy in this planning cycle

    The Action Plan is your commitment layer. It’s what you said you’d do. It’s what gets reviewed. It’s what people are accountable for delivering.

    Example Action Plan for the same customer retention Strategy:

    Initiative Owner Deadline Status
    Launch in-app onboarding flow for Feature X Product Lead Q2 In Progress
    Implement automated churn-risk alert system CS Ops Q1 Complete
    Build customer health score model Data Team Q3 Not Started
    Run quarterly Executive Business Reviews for top 50 accounts Head of CS Ongoing In Progress

    Why Conflating Them Breaks Everything

    When teams mix Dashboard and Action Plan into one undifferentiated list, several things go wrong:

    Reviews become chaotic. Nobody knows whether they’re discussing a metric or a task. Conversations jump between “our NPS is 28” and “we need to hire someone” without structure.

    Accountability disappears. KPIs don’t have owners; they have watchers. Initiatives do have owners. When they’re blended, the owner question gets muddy.

    Progress is invisible. You can’t tell if a Strategy is executing (Action Plan running well) but not working (Dashboard flat). That distinction matters enormously because the response is different.

    Leadership loses confidence. When the Measures column looks like a random list of numbers and activities, senior leaders disengage. They don’t trust the document because it doesn’t give them clarity.

    Keep them separate. Label them explicitly. It’s one of the highest-leverage improvements you can make to your OGSM.

    How Do You Choose the Right KPIs for Each Strategy?

    This is where most OGSM efforts go sideways. Teams either pick too many KPIs, pick the wrong KPIs, or copy KPIs from an industry list that has nothing to do with their specific Strategy.

    Here’s a structured approach.

    Step 1: Anchor to the Strategy Intent

    Every KPI in your Dashboard must connect to a specific Strategy. The question to ask is: If this Strategy is working, what would we expect to see change?

    Write the Strategy at the top of a blank page. Then brainstorm what observable, measurable change that Strategy should produce — in the short term (leading) and the medium-to-long term (lagging).

    For a Strategy like “Expand into the Enterprise segment via direct sales”:

    • Leading: Number of enterprise-qualified opportunities in pipeline, outbound meetings booked
    • Lagging: Enterprise ACV, Enterprise customer count, Enterprise win rate

    If you can’t identify what should change when the Strategy works, the Strategy itself is probably too vague. That’s a useful diagnostic.

    Step 2: Apply the “So What?” Filter

    For every candidate KPI, ask: If this number moves, so what?

    If the answer is “we’d know the Strategy is working/not working and we’d know what to do next” — keep it.

    If the answer is “we’d have an interesting data point” — cut it.

    This is how you eliminate vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are KPIs that feel meaningful because they’re easy to measure (website visits, social followers, email list size) but don’t connect to strategy execution. They don’t pass the So What filter.

    Step 3: Balance Leading and Lagging

    Every Dashboard should include at least one leading and one lagging indicator per Strategy.

    Lagging indicators (outcome metrics): Revenue, profit, customer count, NPS, market share. These confirm whether the Strategy worked — but they tell you after the fact.

    Leading indicators (activity or input metrics): Sales calls per week, content pieces published, feature releases shipped, proposal volume. These predict what the lagging metrics will do — but they require judgment to interpret.

    A Dashboard with only lagging indicators leaves you reacting. A Dashboard with only leading indicators leaves you guessing whether activity is translating to results. You need both.

    Step 4: Limit the Set Ruthlessly

    The maximum for any one Strategy’s Dashboard is 4 KPIs. Ideally 2–3.

    More than 4 is almost always a sign that the team is hedging: they don’t know which indicators actually matter, so they measure everything and hope something rises to the surface. That’s not strategy. That’s data collection.

    Force the conversation: If we could only track two things for this Strategy, which two would tell us the most? Those are your Dashboard KPIs.

    Step 5: Confirm Measurability Today

    Before any KPI makes it into the Dashboard, someone on the team must confirm: Can we actually pull this number right now, with our current tools and data?

    If the answer is “we’d have to build a new report” — put it in the Action Plan as an initiative, then revisit the Dashboard once the data infrastructure exists.

    A KPI you can’t measure is not a KPI. It’s a wish.

    Step 6: Assign an Owner

    Every Dashboard KPI needs one owner — the person who is responsible for pulling the number, validating its accuracy, and presenting it at each review. Not a team. One person.

    Without an owner, numbers get forgotten, miscalculated, or gamed. With an owner, you create accountability for the integrity of the data — separate from accountability for the results.

    What Are the Most Common Mistakes in the Measures Column?

    After working through dozens of OGSM builds, the same mistakes show up again and again. Here are the most damaging ones — and how to fix them.

    Mistake 1: Using Vanity Metrics

    What it looks like: Dashboard filled with website pageviews, social media followers, email subscribers, press mentions, or app downloads.

    Why it happens: These metrics are easy to track, they usually go up, and they feel like progress. Leadership likes seeing green.

    Why it fails: Vanity metrics don’t connect to strategic outcomes. You can have 100,000 Instagram followers and declining revenue. The metric creates a false sense of momentum that masks real strategic stagnation.

    The fix: Apply the So What filter (see above). If the metric rises 20% and you can’t articulate what strategic outcome that causes, it’s a vanity metric. Cut it.

    Mistake 2: Too Many Indicators

    What it looks like: A Measures column with 15–30 KPIs spread across all Strategies, often presented as a comprehensive “metrics framework.”

    Why it happens: Committees and cross-functional input. When multiple stakeholders contribute their preferred metrics, the Dashboard expands to include everyone’s favorites. Nobody wants to be the one who removed a metric.

    Why it fails: When everything is measured, nothing is prioritized. Leaders spend review meetings discussing every number instead of diagnosing what matters. Decision-making slows. Signal drowns in noise.

    The fix: Hard cap at 4 KPIs per Strategy. Present this as a design principle, not a preference. Fewer, sharper metrics create faster, better decisions.

    Mistake 3: Conflating Dashboard and Action Plan

    We’ve covered this above, but it deserves its own spot in the mistakes list because it’s the most common failure mode.

    What it looks like: A Measures column that mixes KPIs (“Churn rate < 2%") with tasks ("Hire CS Manager") and milestones ("Launch new onboarding flow by Q3") in one undifferentiated list.

    Why it happens: Teams try to keep the OGSM document simple by collapsing both elements. The intention is efficiency; the result is confusion.

    Why it fails: See the section above. Reviews become chaotic, accountability disappears, and leadership disengages.

    The fix: Create two explicit sub-sections in each Strategy’s Measures column — one labeled Dashboard, one labeled Action Plan. Even a visual separator (a line or a different background color) helps.

    Mistake 4: Action Plans Without Owners or Deadlines

    What it looks like: An Action Plan that lists initiatives like “Improve the onboarding experience” or “Build out the sales team” — with no owner named and no deadline specified.

    Why it happens: Teams list aspirations rather than commitments. They treat the Action Plan as a brainstorm rather than a contract.

    Why it fails: Without an owner, nobody is accountable. Without a deadline, there’s no urgency. The initiative stays “in progress” indefinitely while the Strategy stalls.

    The fix: Every action in the Action Plan must have a named owner and a specific deadline or target quarter. If you can’t name an owner, the initiative isn’t real yet — it’s an idea. Leave it off the OGSM until it is.

    Mistake 5: Setting Targets Without a Baseline

    What it looks like: Dashboard KPIs with targets like “Achieve NPS of 60” or “Reach $5M ARR” but no recorded baseline — what the number is today.

    Why it happens: Teams are excited about where they want to go and skip the uncomfortable step of documenting where they are.

    Why it fails: Without a baseline, you can’t measure progress. You also can’t calibrate whether the target is ambitious, realistic, or absurd. And in reviews, you end up in arguments about what “good” looks like because there’s no agreed starting point.

    The fix: Record the baseline for every Dashboard KPI before the OGSM goes live. If you don’t know the baseline, measure it immediately. The OGSM document shouldn’t be finalized until baselines are documented.

    Mistake 6: Never Reviewing the Action Plan

    What it looks like: Organizations that review financial metrics monthly but check Action Plan status only at the annual review — by which point half the initiatives are stale or abandoned.

    Why it happens: Leaders are more comfortable discussing numbers than discussing whether initiatives are on track. The Dashboard feels objective; the Action Plan requires accountability conversations.

    Why it fails: Strategies execute through the Action Plan. If nobody is checking whether initiatives are on track, the Strategy isn’t being managed — it’s being wished for.

    The fix: Your Action Plan review cadence should match your Dashboard review cadence. Both get reviewed at the same session. Both get the same level of leadership attention. See our guide to OGSM review cadences for how to structure these sessions.

    What Does a Complete OGSM Measures Column Look Like?

    Here’s a complete, realistic Measures column for a mid-market B2B SaaS company. The Objective is to become the category leader in workflow automation for professional services firms.

    The example covers two Strategies with full Dashboard and Action Plan for each.

    Objective: Become the undisputed workflow automation platform for professional services firms with 50–500 employees.

    Goal: Reach $15M ARR by end of fiscal year, with NPS > 55 and gross revenue retention > 92%.

    Strategy 1: Win the mid-market segment through verticalized outbound sales

    Dashboard:

    Indicator Baseline Target Frequency Owner
    Enterprise-qualified opportunities created (monthly) 12 35 Monthly VP Sales
    Mid-market win rate 18% 28% Monthly Sales Ops
    Average Sales Cycle (days) 67 45 Monthly Sales Ops
    Mid-market ACV $42K $55K Quarterly VP Sales

    Action Plan:

    Initiative Owner Deadline Status
    Hire 3 Mid-Market AEs with professional services vertical experience Head of Talent Q1 Complete
    Build vertical-specific sales playbooks (legal, consulting, accounting) Revenue Enablement Q2 In Progress
    Launch outbound sequence targeting firms 50–500 employees in top 5 verticals SDR Lead Q1 Complete
    Implement deal inspection process for all opportunities > $30K ACV VP Sales Q2 In Progress
    Develop ROI calculator for professional services segment Sales Ops Q2 Not Started

    Strategy 2: Reduce churn by deepening product adoption in year 1

    Dashboard:

    Indicator Baseline Target Frequency Owner
    90-day feature adoption rate (core workflows) 34% 65% Monthly Product Analytics
    12-month gross revenue retention 84% 92% Quarterly VP CS
    Time to first value (days) 28 14 Monthly CS Ops
    Customer health score (% at “healthy” or above) 51% 72% Monthly VP CS

    Action Plan:

    Initiative Owner Deadline Status
    Redesign onboarding flow with role-based paths for 3 personas Product Lead Q2 In Progress
    Build automated customer health scoring model Data Team Q2 In Progress
    Launch 60-day “First 90 Days” success program for all new customers CS Lead Q1 Complete
    Implement churn-risk early warning system with automated CS alerts CS Ops Q2 Not Started
    Create library of vertical-specific workflow templates (5 per vertical) Product + CS Q3 Not Started

    Notice what this example demonstrates:

    • Each Strategy has its own Dashboard and Action Plan — kept cleanly separate
    • Dashboard KPIs have baselines, targets, frequencies, and owners
    • Action Plan initiatives have owners, deadlines, and status — no vague activities
    • Leading indicators (opportunities created, time to first value, health score %) sit alongside lagging indicators (win rate, ACV, gross revenue retention)
    • No more than 4 KPIs per Dashboard
    • No vanity metrics anywhere

    This is the structure. Customize the content for your business, your Strategies, your Goals. The structure should stay consistent.

    For more on this — including the specific Measures column format we use in our OGSM Measures guide and our downloadable OGSM template — those resources give you the exact format to copy.

    How Do You Connect OGSM Measures to Your Review Cadence?

    A Measures column that nobody reviews is a filing exercise, not a management system.

    The entire point of the Dashboard is to enable fast, fact-based conversation at your review sessions. The entire point of the Action Plan is to create accountability between those sessions.

    Here’s the minimal review structure that makes the Measures column earn its keep:

    Monthly review (60–90 minutes):

    • Dashboard: Review all KPIs. Flag anything off-track. Identify root causes for underperforming Strategies.
    • Action Plan: Review status of all initiatives. Identify blockers. Update status.
    • Decision: For each Strategy, is it on track, needs adjustment, or needs escalation?

    Quarterly review (half-day):

    • Everything above, plus:
    • Are targets still appropriate given market conditions?
    • Are the right KPIs in the Dashboard? Are we measuring what actually matters?
    • Do Action Plans need to be refreshed for the next quarter?
    • Are any Strategies no longer viable? Should resources shift?

    Annual review:

    • Full OGSM reset. New Objectives, new Goals, new Strategies — and with those, new Measures.
    • Capture lessons: which Dashboard KPIs were genuinely predictive? Which Action Plan initiatives moved the needle? Which didn’t?

    For a complete breakdown of how to structure each type of review session, including who should attend and what decisions should come out of each, read our OGSM review cadence guide.

    What Do Teams Most Often Ask About OGSM Measures?

    What’s the difference between a KPI and a metric?

    A metric is any number you track. A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a metric that is tied to strategic performance — it tells you whether a key part of your strategy is working. All KPIs are metrics. Not all metrics are KPIs. Your OGSM Dashboard should contain KPIs only.

    How many KPIs should be in the entire OGSM?

    Depends on how many Strategies you have — but the math is simple. With 2–4 KPIs per Strategy and typically 3–6 Strategies per OGSM, you should have somewhere between 6 and 20 Dashboard KPIs total across the entire plan. If you have more than 20, you’re over-measuring. Cut until you feel slightly uncomfortable with how few you have. That’s usually about right.

    Can the same KPI appear in the Dashboard for multiple Strategies?

    Yes, but do it deliberately and sparingly. If a single KPI is sensitive to multiple Strategies, it’s likely a top-level Goal metric rather than a Strategy-specific Dashboard indicator. Consider moving it up to the Goals section and choosing more specific, Strategy-level indicators for each Dashboard.

    What’s the right frequency for Dashboard reviews?

    Monthly is the minimum for most organizations. Weekly is appropriate for early-stage companies or Strategies in critical execution phases. Quarterly is too infrequent — it doesn’t give you enough signal to course-correct during the year. Your dashboard review cadence should match the pace at which you can meaningfully take corrective action.

    Do Action Plans need to be in the OGSM document itself, or can they live in a separate project management tool?

    They should be referenced in the OGSM, even if they’re managed in a separate tool (Asana, Jira, Monday, etc.). The OGSM document should at minimum show the top 3–5 initiatives per Strategy, their owners, and their deadlines. The detailed task management can live in your project tool. What matters is that the two are linked — someone looking at the OGSM should be able to see what’s being done, not just what’s being measured.

    How is the OGSM Measures column different from OKR Key Results?

    Both aim to define “how we know we’re succeeding.” The key difference is that OGSM explicitly separates monitoring (Dashboard) from execution (Action Plan), while OKRs often conflate them in Key Results. OKRs also tend to operate on shorter cycles (quarterly) and are more bottom-up; OGSM is typically annual and top-down. Neither is inherently better — the right choice depends on your organization’s planning culture. OGSM’s Measures structure is more prescriptive, which is both its strength (clarity) and its challenge (requires discipline to maintain).

    What if I can’t measure something that clearly matters to a Strategy?

    Put a measurement initiative in your Action Plan. “Build capability to measure [X]” is a legitimate action. In the Dashboard, note the KPI as “under development” and use the closest available proxy until the real measurement is in place. Don’t leave the Dashboard slot empty — a proxy is better than nothing, and the action to build better measurement keeps the team honest.

    How do I handle Strategies that are inherently hard to quantify — like culture or brand?

    Every Strategy has some observable outcome you can measure, even if imperfectly. Culture: employee engagement score, retention rate, internal promotion rate, management effectiveness rating. Brand: aided awareness (survey), share of voice, earned media mentions, branded search volume. The KPIs won’t be perfect. That’s fine. The discipline of choosing something measurable forces strategic clarity and prevents culture/brand from becoming a catch-all for initiatives that don’t need to justify their results.

    The Measures column is where your OGSM lives or dies. Get it right — with a clean separation between Dashboard and Action Plan, KPIs tied directly to each Strategy, and a review rhythm that keeps everyone accountable — and your OGSM becomes a genuine management system. Get it wrong, and it becomes a very well-formatted wishlist.

    If you’re building your Measures column for the first time, start with the OGSM template. If you want a deeper look at the column structure specifically, the OGSM Measures overview is the right next step.

    Rock on.

  • How to Cascade Your OGSM Across Your Organisation

    How to Cascade Your OGSM Across Your Organisation

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

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

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

    Why Cascading Matters

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

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

    The Structure of a Cascade

    Think of it as a tree:

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

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

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

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

    How to Build the Cascade

    Step 1: Lock the Company OGSM First

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

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

    Step 2: Identify Each Department’s Contribution

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

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

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

    Step 3: Write the Department Goals

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

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

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

    Step 4: Define Department Strategies

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

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

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

    Step 5: Set Department Measures

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

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

    Making the Cascade Visible

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

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

    Common Cascade Mistakes

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

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

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

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

    Cascade in a Small Business

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

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

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

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

    The Right Format for a Cascade

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

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