Who Is Allowed to Cancel a Goal?

Most advice about planning under uncertainty ends in the same place: be agile, be adaptable, keep several scenarios open. It is true and it is useless, because it does not say what anyone should do on a Tuesday in week seven when the assumption behind the quarterly goal has just disappeared.

That is where the problem actually sits. Not in plans going out of date, because they always do. In nobody having agreed in advance who gets to say that a goal no longer applies, and when.

What happens without that agreement

A supplier drops out. A regulation changes. The largest customer postpones. The quarterly goal you set in January is now either impossible or irrelevant. Then one of two things happens.

The team keeps working towards the goal because it is in the system and nobody has said otherwise. They spend six weeks on work everyone knows is wasted, and report status every week as though nothing had happened.

Or the goal disappears quietly. Nobody cancels it, it simply stops being mentioned. By week thirteen everyone has forgotten it existed. And because it was never cancelled, it was never discussed what should have taken its place.

Both outcomes come from nobody knowing they were allowed to make the decision.

Four mechanisms

Write down what the goal assumes

When the goal is set, note in one sentence what has to be true for it to make sense. "This assumes the supplier agreement with X holds." "This assumes we get the certification in February." The assumption is what needs watching, not only the progress. When it breaks you know immediately, and you are spared the argument about whether anything has actually changed.

Most teams manage this in five minutes per goal. The value is not the sentence itself, but that it forces the question of what you are actually counting on.

Have one point where cancelling is legitimate

Put it in the middle of the quarter, around week eight. That is early enough to move people and money, and late enough that you know something you did not know in January. The meeting has one item on the agenda: which goals no longer apply?

Without such a point, cancelling a goal becomes an admission somebody has to volunteer for, and nobody takes that conversation willingly.

Separate the goals that must hold from the ones that can fall

Mark every goal as committed or exploratory when it is set. A committed goal has been promised to someone outside the team, and is to be delivered even if it turns out more expensive than planned. An exploratory goal is a bet you are making because the upside is large, and it can be cancelled without anyone having broken a promise.

Mix the two and you end up defending the wrong goal under pressure. It is usually the committed one that gives way, because the exploratory one is more interesting to work on.

Keep some capacity unallocated

A quarter where every hour is planned has no room for what actually happens. Set a share aside in advance, without deciding what it is for. This feels like waste right up until it does not.

What should not change

The direction. If the company has decided that enterprise customers are to become the most important segment, that holds even if the quarter's numbers have to be rewritten. It is the numbers and the dates that can take being moved, not what you are doing.

This is also the answer to a question that is usually asked wrong. Adjusting goals regularly sounds sensible, but a goal that changes every month is not a goal, it is a log of what the team is doing right now. Set the annual direction for twelve months, the quarterly goals for twelve weeks, and let the single fixed mid-quarter review be the place where the quarterly goals are torn up if they need to be.

On resilience and growth

The advice to prioritize resilience over growth in uncertain times is usually given without the price tag, and the price tag is the whole point.

Having several suppliers costs more per unit than having one. Holding capital back means something did not get invested. Keeping people through a downturn costs salary for months without revenue from them. These are real expenses you pay for insurance you may not need.

The decision is therefore not whether resilience is good. It is how much you are willing to pay, and against which risk. Write it down as a number when you decide it, or it becomes a fresh argument every time somebody looks at the margin.

How Markviss is used for this

• Assumptions on the goal. The description field on each category can be used to write down what the goal rests on, so it sits next to the progress and not in an email.
• Scenarios per quarter. Enter several planned values and switch between them as assumptions change, without losing the history of what the plan originally was.
• Marking the goal type. Use the category structure to keep committed and exploratory goals apart, so it is visible what can be cancelled without negotiation.
• One plan to measure the gap against. When the assumption breaks, you see it as a gap against the plan rather than a hunch someone has to argue for.

What the tool does not do is make the decision to cancel. That has to be made by a person with a name, in a meeting agreed in advance.

In short

Uncertainty does not make planning pointless. It makes it necessary to decide, before the quarter starts, who can say that the plan no longer applies.

Try it on one goal first. Write down what it assumes, and see whether the assumption still holds in six weeks.