We have watched a lot of OGSM plans work and a fair number not work. The failures are remarkably consistent, and almost none of them are failures of the model.
They are failures of choosing, or failures of rhythm. Seven, in the order we meet them.
1. The plan with no direction
Forty pages of grand narrative and distant horizons. Every stakeholder’s concern is in there somewhere. Nobody could object to a word of it.
And that is the problem: a plan broad enough to offend nobody can justify any activity at all. Ask three teams what it means for their Monday and you will get three answers, all defensible.
What it looks like: an ambition full of quality, innovation, excellence and sustainability. No numbers, or numbers that only appear in an appendix.
The fix: the Goals. Force every part of the ambition through the question how would we see that? If a phrase in your Objective cannot survive that question, it is decoration. Cut it or make it concrete.
2. The plan because the boss said so
Every year the department writes a plan, because there is no budget without one. It gets submitted, approved and filed. Nobody opens it again until next year, when it gets updated by editing last year’s version.
What it looks like: the plan exists, is technically correct, and nobody can quote a single line of it.
The fix: ownership, and writing it with the people who will execute it. A plan handed down is a plan nobody owns. If the team that has to deliver it was not in the room when the choices were made, they are complying rather than committing, and compliance runs out around March.
3. The shadow plan
There is a plan. And then there is what the team actually works on.
This one is common and rarely acknowledged, because both things are running quite happily in parallel. The plan describes the strategic ambition. The team spends its weeks on customer escalations, a system migration and whatever the largest client asked for last week.
What it looks like: if you compared the plan against last month’s calendars, they would have very little in common.
The fix: the OGSM has to be the one and only plan for the team. Everything the team wants to achieve, and everything it steers on. If work is genuinely important but is not in the plan, that is information: either the plan is wrong, or the work should stop. Both are real answers. Ignoring the gap is not.
4. Too many strategies
Seven strategies. Sometimes nine. Each one perfectly reasonable on its own.
But you have a fixed amount of time and attention. Nine strategies means either two of them quietly get no resource, or all nine get a fraction of what they need. Either way, nobody decided which: the shortfall gets distributed by accident.
What it looks like: a strategy list where you cannot say what was rejected, and where nobody can name the “no longer doing” list because there isn’t one.
The fix: cap it at five substantive strategies plus two preconditions, and write the other list explicitly. If cutting to five feels impossible, that is usually a signal about the Objective rather than the strategies. An ambition that needs nine routes is probably more than one ambition.
5. The eternal X
During the session, the team could not agree on a target value. Someone wrote X or TBD, and everyone moved on with relief.
Which is fine: building an OGSM is iterative, and parking a number is better than stalling the session. The failure is what happens next, which is nothing. We still see plans where that X has survived several years.
What it looks like: a Goal or KPI with no target value that nobody mentions at reviews, because with no target there is nothing to report against.
The fix: whenever you write an X, write a date next to it. And treat an unfilled X at the next review as an agenda item, not a formatting quirk. An X that survives two reviews is telling you something: usually that nobody is willing to commit to that number, which is worth discussing openly.
6. The action nobody can finish
“Continuously focus on sustainability.” “Keep improving customer communication.” “Monitor developments in the market.”
These are not actions. They are moods. You cannot complete them, so at every review they report the same thing forever.
A close relative is the action that is real but is far too big: an eighteen-month programme sitting on the page as one line, reporting “40 percent, green” for a year and telling you nothing.
What it looks like: actions with no verb you can finish, or actions whose percentage barely moves between reviews.
The fix: every action gets a verb and an end. And it has to fit inside one cycle: if it cannot be completed between two review sessions, break it into pieces that can. Also check the total: add the actions up against the capacity behind them, and cut until the arithmetic works.
7. No rhythm
The plan is genuinely good. The ambition is sharp, the choices are real, the actions have owners.
It was presented in January. It is now September and nobody has opened it.
This is the most common failure of all, and the most avoidable. Organizations are enthusiastic about making plans: the analysis, the sessions, the coherence between documents. Far less attention goes to how the plan will be executed, and sometimes none at all.
What it looks like: you have to go looking for the file.
The fix: put the reviews in the calendar for twelve months before you finish the plan, and hold them. Monthly action review: are we doing things right? Quarterly strategy review: are we doing the right things? Twenty percent of your effort on writing, eighty on execution.
And make amber safe to report. If people only flag trouble once it is already red, the rhythm hands you nothing you could still have acted on. Why every light being green is a warning sign →
The pattern underneath
Read the seven back and there are really two.
Pitfalls one to five are failures of choosing. A plan that avoids a decision (about what matters, about what stops, about which number you commit to) will not produce results, however well it is formatted. A decision that costs you nothing was not a decision. The discomfort is the evidence that something was genuinely given up.
Pitfalls six and seven are failures of execution. A good plan with no rhythm decays quietly, and it decays faster than anyone expects.
What actually takes the time is deciding what to leave off the page, and then having the same honest conversation every month for three years.
That is the whole method. The rest is layout.