Most organizations have an autumn ritual. Departments write plans for next year, someone consolidates them, a budget gets attached, and the result is presented in December.
By March, few people could tell you what was in it.
OGSM handles annual planning well, but only if you resist the obvious mistake, which is treating the plan as something that begins in January and ends in December.
The autumn ritual
Consider what the traditional cycle actually produces.
Each department writes a plan largely disconnected from the others. Each looks exactly twelve months ahead, so anything that takes longer gets split awkwardly or quietly omitted. The multi-year strategy, if there is one, lives in a separate document that nobody opens while writing the annual plan. And the whole thing is rewritten from scratch every autumn, which means the previous year’s thinking is mostly discarded rather than built on.
The result is a plan that is technically complete and strategically weightless.
Split the page, not the plan
The fix is neat, and it uses the structure of OGSM directly.
Objective, Goals and Strategies hold for several years. They are the multi-year strategy: where you are going, how you will know you got there, and which route you chose.
KPIs and actions describe the coming year. They are the annual plan: what results you want this year and what you will do to get them.
One page, two horizons, and the long term stays visible while you plan the year, because it is directly above the year on the same sheet.
That solves the deepest problem with the autumn ritual. You are no longer choosing between a strategic plan nobody reads and an annual plan with no strategy in it. The annual plan is the bottom half of the strategic plan.
What changes each year
The Objective usually does not. A three-to-five-year ambition should survive a year without amendment. If yours needs rewriting annually, it was probably a target rather than an ambition.
The Goals usually do not either. They describe the end state at the horizon.
The strategies mostly stay, but the wording often shifts. A strategic choice holds for years, and how you describe it sharpens as you learn. That is not instability. A strategy phrased in year one out of hope reads differently in year two, when you know which part of it is hard.
The KPIs and actions are rewritten. New targets for the coming year, a new set of actions. This is where the real annual planning work happens, and it is a far smaller job than starting from nothing.
Which is the practical payoff: your autumn planning session stops being “write a plan” and becomes “confirm the route, then decide this year’s work.” Considerably shorter, and considerably better.
Rolling planning
More organizations are dropping the fixed annual cycle altogether.
With rolling planning, you use the review sessions to look two to five quarters ahead and update the plan as you go. There is no planning season. The plan is never more than a quarter out of date.
The advantages are real. Nothing arbitrary happens at the year boundary: work that runs from October to March is planned as one thing rather than split across two documents. And the plan is always current, because it is updated in a session that was happening anyway.
The disadvantage is subtler. When the plan is continuously nudged, nobody ever stops to ask whether the foundations still hold. Every individual adjustment is sensible; three years of them can walk you somewhere nobody chose.
Step back once a year
Which is why, whichever cycle you use, take a proper step back once or twice a year.
Not to review progress. You do that monthly and quarterly. To review the foundations:
- Are we still facing the same challenges?
- Have new opportunities or threats appeared that the plan does not account for?
- Have our strengths or weaknesses changed?
- Given all that, does the Objective still describe where we want to go?
This is essentially step zero from the four-step method, run again on an existing plan. It takes a session.
It matters most for plans higher up the organization, where the environment moves and the horizon is long. For an operational team executing a well-understood strategy, a lighter touch is fine.
Reporting to a board
One practical benefit worth knowing about, because it saves a specific and unloved piece of work.
If your plan lives in an OGSM and progress is reported against it every quarter, the quarterly report to a board or supervisory council is largely already written. One regional hospital simply prints its OGSM report each quarter and sends it to the supervisory board.
That is a real saving. But the better effect is what it does to the conversation: the board sees the same page the team steers by, rather than a document prepared specially for them. Fewer surprises in both directions.
Getting started this autumn
If you are heading into a planning cycle and want to use OGSM for it:
Do not start with next year. Start with the horizon. Three to five years, and write the Objective for that.
Then this year’s Measures. Once the route is agreed, deciding the year’s KPIs and actions is quick.
Put the reviews in the calendar before you finish. Monthly action reviews and quarterly strategy reviews, for the whole year, booked now. December is exactly when this gets postponed, and a rhythm postponed once tends not to start.
Expect the second year to be much easier. The first cycle is the expensive one, because you are agreeing the ambition and the choices. After that, annual planning is a session about the bottom half of a page you already have.