Goal Core · Tactical goals · Module
Resourcing
What the goal costs in money, people and attention, agreed before it is committed to. The test is whether the owner could describe the resource without checking.
The idea
How it works
An unresourced goal is worse than no goal. It consumes attention, generates reporting and produces nothing, while occupying the slot a fundable goal could have used.
Money is usually the easiest of the three resources to secure and the least often the real constraint. Attention is the scarce one: the number of things a given team can genuinely hold at once is small, and it does not increase because more goals were assigned.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Cost it in people-weeks first
Money can often be found. Time from the specific people who can do the work usually cannot.
- 02
Check the owner’s existing load
A new goal for someone already at capacity is a decision to drop something else, whether or not that is said out loud.
- 03
Fund it or drop it
The honest options are two. Leaving it on the list unfunded is the third and worst.
One level in
The components of resourcing
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
The resource estimate
People-weeks, money and any external dependency, stated before commitment.
Learn
The capacity check is the one usually skipped, and the one that most reliably explains why a well-formed plan produced nothing.
The other modules in tactical goals
Cascade and catchball
Carrying a strategic goal down into commitments, and letting the answers come back up and change it. The upward half is the part most cascades leave out.
LearnInitiatives
The named, finishable pieces of work a tactical goal resolves into. Each with a start, an end, and something that exists afterwards which did not before.
LearnOwnership
One named person accountable for each goal, distinct from the people doing the work and from those merely informed.
Learn