Most articles about OGSM show you an empty grid with four labels in it, and perhaps one invented objective about becoming the market leader in renewable energy.
That is not much help. What you want, when you are writing your first plan, is to see a finished one.
So here are two, complete. One is a commercial company with a growth ambition and a margin problem. The other is a non-profit whose constraint is not money but people. Between them they cover most of what changes when the context changes.
Solar energy company
A solar panel supplier working through installers, with a new energy-sharing service and a margin problem.
Elderly care provider
A care organization for older people, working in a region with several other providers and a shrinking workforce.
How to read them
Both examples are laid out the same way, because the layout is part of the model.
The Objective runs across the top: the ambition in words, with a horizon. Under it, the Goals make that ambition measurable. Then the strategies form the rows, and each row carries its own KPIs and its own actions.
That row-level pairing is the thing to look at. You can read across a single line and follow it from “this is the route we chose” to “this is how we will know it is working” to “this is who is doing what by when.” When a plan is weak it is almost always because that line breaks somewhere: a strategy with no KPI, or an action attached to nothing.
What to notice in both
They are short. Both are company-wide plans with a multi-year horizon, and neither has more than four strategies. Not because there was nothing else to do, but because everything else was decided against.
The Objectives name both the what and the how. The ambition and the broad approach in one sentence. Strip out the how and either one becomes a slogan.
The Goals carry units. Not “grow revenue” but “revenue above €35 million.” Not “happier employees” but “employee satisfaction above 8.5 out of 10.” You can be wrong about a number, which is the point.
Some strategies are preconditions. Improving your own IT capability does not sound like strategy. It is, when the thing you are selling depends on an app that keeps failing.
The actions name a person and a quarter. Every one is something specific that someone can finish.
Use them to calibrate, not to copy
One caution, and it matters more than it sounds.
The value of an OGSM is not the document. It is the argument the team had while writing it: about what matters most, and about what you will stop doing. Copy someone else’s strategies and you get the artefact without the agreement, which is precisely the shadow plan the model exists to prevent.
So read these to calibrate. Is my Objective as concrete as that one? Do my strategies exclude anything, the way these do? Are my KPIs things I could actually measure next month?
Then go and have the argument with your own team.