The annual plan lands on your desk with a long list of KPIs and OKRs.
It arrives in the same week as board prep, a funder report, a hiring decision and whatever caught fire on Tuesday.
So the goals get a skim.
Increase our reach this year by 25%.
Raise $500K.
Train 500 farmers by December.
They look like goals. Nothing in them is obviously wrong and there are forty other things to get through.
Approved for now. We’ll fix it later.
I’ve seen this in many organisations I’ve engaged with. I’ve also been in the room in the weeks that follow, when the funder report is due and someone asks what moved.
Reach whom?
Raised, meaning pledged or in the bank?
Trained, and then what changed?
Nobody can say and by May, the work has gone wherever the urgent things were. It looks nothing like the goals fixed in January.
Here’s the pattern underneath.
A goal that sounds measurable but can’t be measured is a wish. Most goals start that way.
The instinct is to rewrite them all yourself. That’s a second job on top of the first. Even if you did it, your team would learn nothing, so the same gaps would be back next year.
This is a thinking problem, and it lives one level down from you.
Many teams were never shown what a measurable goal looks like. They were handed a template and a deadline and told to get on with it.
Today’s Permission Slip:
You have permission to stop being the editor of your team’s goals and to give them what they need to sharpen those goals before the plan reaches you.
Why this feels risky:
You’re the one who knows what a good goal looks like. What if they get it wrong? What if the plan is due Friday and handing the work back feels slower? What if it looks like you’ve stopped paying attention?
But every goal you rewrite yourself fixes one line. The thinking behind the next line stays exactly where it was.
The Practice:
Start with one goal. Before the plan reaches your desk, ask whoever wrote it:
“If two of us measured this independently next month, would we get the same number?”
If they hesitate, that’s the conversation worth having. It costs far less in October than at the funder report.
To make this repeatable, I built a skill your team can run on every goal before it reaches you. (A skill is a set of instructions you add to an AI assistant like Claude. This one teaches it to review goals the way I would.)
It:
- Tells them what they’ve actually written: a KPI, a key result, an objective, an initiative or a wish
- Runs seven checks and explains what’s missing and why it matters
- Gives them a rewrite with the blanks marked, not invented
- Coaches them to a goal, one question at a time, if there’s no draft yet
That’s where your team’s thinking can change over time. Your review will then shift from editing poorly written goals to deciding on them.
Download the skill from github. It's free. No email needed.
This Week’s Question:
Which goal on this year’s plan could your team have sharpened themselves, if anyone had shown them how?
Here’s to leading differently,
Raghav
P.S. Know someone about to start their planning cycle? Forward this to them.
P.P.S. If every KPI/OKR rewrite still routes through you, The Clarity X-Ray shows you where decision making is getting stuck and what to fix first, so your organisation can move without waiting on you.
