If you’re in the middle of goal-setting or annual planning, it’s worth pausing to check for these three common failure modes.
I’ve seen these show up across industries and sectors, often for understandable reasons, but they tend to lead to one of two outcomes:
Teams technically hit targets without meaningfully improving anything.
Organizations create avoidable inefficiency that quietly drains time, money, and morale.
Failure Mode 1️⃣: Too many goals.
Unintended consequence → At any given time, most employees won’t confidently know what matters most, which makes sustained focus nearly impossible. This confusion compounds as it spreads across the organization.
Failure Mode 2️⃣: Treating a building or rebuilding year like a “normal” year when selecting metrics.
Unintended consequence → The organization measures activity, not trajectory. Leaders become overly focused on assumed-correct outcomes, which narrows attention and obscures the deeper progress that actually needs to be made.
Failure Mode 3️⃣: Insufficient operating cadence around goals.
Unintended consequence → Work slowly drifts, momentum fades, teams lose clarity, productivity drops, and course correction happens too late (if at all).
If you’re navigating planning right now and want a quick outside perspective, I’m happy to talk it through.
Feel free to contact me for a complimentary 25-minute advisory conversation.