Seven Reasons Goals Come to Nothing

What the numbers actually say: In 2013 the Economist Intelligence Unit surveyed 587 senior executives on behalf of the Project Management Institute. 61% said their company struggles to connect strategy formulation to day-to-day operations. On average, 56% of their strategic initiatives over the previous three years succeeded — meaning almost half did not.

That is a survey of executives' own estimates, not an audit of their accounts, and it is from 2013. Use it as an indication that the problem is widespread, not as a measurement of your organisation.

This guide works through seven patterns that recur when goals come to nothing. Each has a remedy that costs no money, only discomfort.

1. Too many goals

Teams and individuals carry ten, fifteen or twenty goals at once. Attention is spread until it counts for nothing anywhere.

Why it happens

New goals are added without old ones being removed. Prioritising means saying no to something a colleague proposed, and that is an uncomfortable conversation, easily postponed until the list has grown past what anyone can handle. Departments also set goals separately, with nobody seeing the combined load on the people who have to deliver.

A warning about the argument you may have heard

Many sources justify a limit of five to seven goals with Miller's "magical number seven", or with cognitive load theory. That is a misuse. Miller's 1956 work is about how many items working memory holds at once, and later research has revised the number downwards. It says nothing about how many projects a team can run over twelve weeks. The limit of three to five is practice that works, not a result from psychology, and it holds up perfectly well without borrowed authority.

The remedy

Set the limit at five per person and five to seven per team, and enforce it. Require that a goal is removed before a new one is added. Ask leaders to rank their goals from one down, and strike everything below fifth place. The ranking is the whole point, because it forces the choice the list was built to avoid.

2. Goals that work against each other

Two departments each have a sensible goal, and the goals pull in opposite directions.

• Sales is to grow aggressively while Product is to stabilise the platform.
• Marketing delivers leads from a segment Sales has stopped pursuing.
• Engineering builds new features while Customer Success waits for bug fixes.
• Finance cuts a line item Operations needed to hit its delivery goal.

Why it happens

Goals are set in parallel, each in its own department, in the same week. Nobody reads them together until the quarter is under way.

The remedy

Half a day before each quarter where department heads read each other's drafts with one question in mind: what do I have to do to hit my goal that makes yours harder? Write the dependencies down on the goal itself. Have an agreed route for escalating conflicts you don't resolve in the room.

Two or three goals that several departments share responsibility for make the rest of the coordination easier, provided each of them has one owner. See the next point.

3. Nobody owns the goal

A goal assigned to "the team" or "the leadership group" is assigned to nobody. Everyone assumes someone else is following up.

Why it happens

Shared ownership looks like collaboration and feels more inclusive to decide. The cost only surfaces in week nine, when it turns out nobody has tracked the number since week two.

The analogy to the bystander effect from social psychology is close at hand, and it is useful as an image. Just be aware that it is an image. Darley and Latané's experiments were about emergencies, not quarterly goals, and the strength of the effect has been debated ever since.

The remedy

Exactly one named person per goal. The owner must have real decision-making authority and access to resources, or you have moved the responsibility without moving the power. Contributors report to the owner, not to a forum. Have the owner say the goal out loud in a meeting where others hear it.

Amazon does this in a strict form with what they call single-threaded leaders: one leader owns the initiative and can decide without going through a committee. The model is well documented and worth reading about, though it assumes an organisational size most companies don't have.

One owner does not mean one person does the work. It means one person answers for where it stands.

4. The goals are never looked at again

The goals are set in January and read again in December.

Why it happens

The annual cycle gives the impression that a goal is finished once it has been written. Operations eat the calendar. And leaders assume someone will speak up if something is off, while most people wait to speak up until it is too late to do anything.

What happens in the meantime

Teams drift imperceptibly towards the work they know best. Obstacles build for weeks before anyone mentions them. The market changes and the goal becomes irrelevant without anyone updating it. And people stop believing the goals matter, because nobody seems to care about them between January and December.

The remedy

Three levels, in the calendar before the quarter starts:

Frequency	Duration	Content	Who
Weekly	15 min	Status and obstacles	Team and manager
Monthly	1 hour	The numbers in depth, tactical adjustment	Department
Quarterly	Half a day	Assessment and next quarter's goals	Cross-functional

The same agenda every time: where do we stand, what is stopping us, what are we doing next week. Have an agreed route for escalating obstacles the same day they are raised.

5. Goals nobody believes in

Leadership sets numbers that are impossible, and the team stops trying.

Why it happens

Pressure from owners or the board is translated straight into targets. Historical results are set aside in favour of the number someone needs to be able to present. And "ambitious" gets confused with "impossible", which are two different things even though they look alike in a spreadsheet.

What the research actually says

Locke and Latham's goal-setting theory (1990) shows that specific, demanding goals produce better performance than vague or easy ones — provided people are committed to the goal and have the ability to reach it. The commitment is not a detail in that sentence. A goal nobody believes in gets no commitment, and then the premise for the whole finding falls away.

In Goals Gone Wild (Academy of Management Perspectives, 2009), Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman went through the documented side effects of aggressive goals: increased risk-taking, weakened collaboration between teams, and the temptation to massage the numbers once the distance to the target gets large enough.

The remedy

Ask the question directly when the goal is set: how likely is it that we manage this? Write the answer down. Anchor the number in what you actually delivered last year, plus an improvement someone can explain how to achieve. Let the team that has to deliver help set the number.

And keep the three types apart:

• Operational goals are to be met. Probability above 90%.
• Strategic goals can stand missing a little. Around 70–80%.
• Exploratory goals are bets with low probability and large upside. 10–30%.

Note that this is the probability of succeeding, which is a different thing from OKR practice's advice to aim for 70% attainment. The two numbers look alike and do not mean the same thing. Be explicit about which one you are talking about.

6. Nothing to measure with

The goal is set, but nobody can produce the number that decides whether it has been reached.

Why it happens

Leadership assumes the data exists. It is scattered across spreadsheets, email and the heads of four people. Tracking is manual, and the number is out of date by the time it is presented. Some goals are also set for activities no system records.

What it costs

The team doesn't know whether it is on track until the quarter is over. Judging whether the goal was met becomes a matter of opinion, and matters of opinion are settled by whoever argues best rather than by what happened. Problems only become visible once they have grown large.

The remedy

Check measurability before the goal is adopted, not after. If you can't pull the number automatically, you must either build the data foundation first or choose a different goal. Decide who owns each metric, how it is calculated and how often it updates, and write that down somewhere others will find it. Include at least one leading indicator per goal, since outcome numbers arrive too late to steer by.

7. Nobody knows the goals

Goals that exist only in the leadership group do not exist in practice.

Why it happens

The goals are presented once, at an all-hands, and then filed in a document with restricted access. The information has to pass through three levels of management to arrive, losing detail at each one.

The symptoms

People can't recite the company's priorities when asked. Two departments do the same work without knowing about each other. Leadership is frustrated that "people aren't working on what matters", without having made it possible for people to know what that is.

Without known priorities, people fall back on what is urgent, or on what they are best at. Both are rational choices for the individual.

The remedy

All goals visible to everyone, with the burden of justification on exceptions rather than on access. Progress updated today, not in the next quarterly presentation. A visible hierarchy where a team goal can be traced up to the company goal it serves. Repetition from leadership, of the same priorities, more often than feels necessary. And team meetings that start with which goal the item on the table belongs to.

Buffer has taken this furthest among the companies that write about it: over years they have published both salaries and financial key figures openly online. It is a model few can copy directly, but it shows where the boundary actually lies, and it lies further out than most people think.

Checklist before a goal is adopted

Seven questions. If the answer is no to any of them, the goal isn't finished.

1. Count. Does this person or team have five goals or fewer once this is added?
2. Conflict. Have the affected departments read the goal? Does it make anyone else's goal harder?
3. Owner. Is it exactly one named person? Do they have the authority to decide?
4. Follow-up. Are the reviews in the calendar? Who runs them?
5. Realism. How likely is it that we manage this, and what kind of goal is it — operational or exploratory?
6. Measurement. Can the number be pulled automatically? Do we know the starting value?
7. Visibility. Will everyone affected be able to see the goal and its progress?

How Markviss relates to the seven

Software does not solve reluctance to prioritise, or a leadership group that doesn't follow up. Points 1, 2 and 5 are decisions people have to make. What a tool can do is show how things stand and take the friction out of recording it.

The goal count is visible

Markviss shows how many goals each team and each person carries, so the conversation about prioritisation starts from a number rather than an impression. The limit is yours to set and yours to hold.

Goal hierarchy across departments

See how goals connect between departments, and which ones depend on each other.

An owner on the goal

Each goal has an owner field, and a named owner sits in the structure rather than in an email. Filling it in is a discipline you adopt.

Somewhere for the recurring review to land

Recording status takes minutes, so a weekly check-in has a place to go instead of turning into a reporting exercise. The invitation belongs in your calendar.

Confidence in reaching the goal

Teams state how confident they are. Leadership sees early which goals are starting to slip.

Metrics connected to the source

Key results are pulled from the data rather than typed in by hand.

You decide who sees what

You set who can reach which goals — the whole company, a department, or a named few. Open by default is a choice you make, not a setting we make for you.

Where to begin

Take one failure pattern at a time. The order below is chosen because each step makes the next one easier.

First month: find out where you stand

Count how many goals each person and each team actually has. Put the department goals side by side and look for conflicts. Note which goals lack an owner or a measurable number. Ask ten people at random what the company's three most important goals are, and write the answers down verbatim.

Second month: clear out

Cut to five goals per person. Put one owner on each. Put the weekly reviews in the calendar. Make the goals visible.

Third month: look for change

Compare with what you counted in month one. Ask what is stopping people. Take the next pattern next quarter.

Don't expect to see the effect in the result figures yet. What you can measure after a quarter is whether people know the goals, whether each goal has an owner, and whether the reviews were actually held. Those are three process measures, and they are the only ones that are honest to measure this early.

In short

The seven patterns are too many goals, goals that work against each other, unclear ownership, missing follow-up, unrealistic numbers, missing data, and goals nobody knows about.

None of them costs money to fix. They require someone to say no to a goal a colleague proposed, the leadership group to set aside half a day before each quarter, and someone to actually hold the fifteen minutes a week.

Start by counting how many goals people have. That number usually decides which of the seven you have.