(2022-09-18) Cutler TBM-4151 Why Goal Cascades Are Harmful, and What To Do Instead

John Cutler: TBM 41/51: Why Goal Cascades are Harmful (and What to Do Instead). In the cascade, we limit the number of top-level goals. You might think this is a good thing—fewer priorities—but that isn’t the case. Why? The goals are high level and don’t provide adequate forcing functions.

The cascade tends to reinforce organizational boundaries

Efficiency in one part of the organization could have a widespread impact and kick off virtuous loops. Moving an input “at the frontlines” could be very high leverage.

The cascade often leaves things out due to the forced simplicity at the top. It can be heavily biased towards new stuff and leave out ongoing activities

You lose the nuance of inputs and outputs with goal cascades

More goals can equate to more context and not more work. (strategic context)

Goal cascades combine too many ideas and attempt to do too many jobs. They have shades of driver trees, inputs/outputs, MBO, efforts at empowerment, context sharing, prioritization, tactics, strategy, and strategy deployment. But don’t do any of those well.

What is the alternative?

Create a model that maps the drivers of your business. This model should be agnostic to anything you have on your roadmap.

Add measurement (metrics) to that model.

Prioritize points of leverage. We might consider these high-level opportunities.

Identify goals for those points of leverage (see rest of list)

In the image below, goals would come after strategy

At a very high level, what we are doing here is decoupling goal setting from the org chart and org hierarchy while grounding it in a universally accepted model

Goals should form a network because models tend to create a network. It isn’t completely flat because there are relationships.