Below is the shape of the process: a step zero, because a good plan needs preparation before the model comes anywhere near it, and then the four building blocks in order.

Be warned: this is iterative. You will get to step three, learn something, and go back to step one. Expect to do that two or three times.

Before you start

Two things are true of every OGSM that ever worked.

The team that executes the plan writes the plan. Not the director alone, not a strategy department, not a consultant. People own what they helped build.

The messy bit is the valuable bit. The arguments about what you really mean, what you are actually going to stop doing, whether that target is realistic. That is the work. A session that runs smoothly from start to finish usually means nobody said what they thought.

Step 0: preparation

Skip this and everything afterwards takes twice as long. Three things to settle.

Name the owner and the team. The owner is responsible for the results and therefore for the content of the plan, and saying who it is out loud settles who decides when the team cannot agree. The team is the people who will execute it, and deciding who that is sounds trivial and often is not: is this the board’s plan or the whole management team’s, the department’s or one unit inside it?

Agree your requirements and wants. Requirements are non-negotiable, so an idea that fails one is out however appealing. Wants help you rank what survives. Agreeing both before anyone looks at an idea is what makes real choosing possible later, and a good share of them usually come from outside the team: a board, a shareholder, a regulator. Ask explicitly.

Name the challenges. You probably have ideas already; hold them. First ask what you actually have to overcome, looking outward at opportunities and threats and inward at strengths and weaknesses. Phrase every one as a question starting with how can we, because “supplier dependency” is a topic and invites nodding, while “how can we reduce our dependence on a single supplier?” invites answers. Then cut to about five.

You rarely need a full research phase first. Most teams already carry enough knowledge to name their real challenges, and analysis is a popular way of postponing the choices.

Step 1: the Objective

Set the horizon first: three to five years for a strategic plan, the end date for a project. Sometimes it is simply given to you.

Then write the sentence. Collect the words that must not be missing, as a team and without debate. Decide together which of them are genuinely essential. Then draft full sentences in pairs, each containing both the what and the how, compare the drafts and sharpen the strongest one.

Do not chase the perfect wording today. You will learn things in steps two and three that send you back here anyway.

Step 2: the Goals

Now make the ambition concrete, and do it by derivation rather than brainstorm.

Break the Objective into its components, word by word. For each one ask “how would we see that?” Not “what should we target” but “what would we observe if this were true?” That question is the whole step, and it is what stops a goal list from becoming a wish list.

Then check for preconditions: goals that are not part of the ambition but that it depends on. Employee satisfaction is the usual example.

If the team struggles here, it is almost never about numbers. It is that people had different pictures of the Objective in their heads, which is exactly what you wanted to find out.

Step 3: the Strategies

The destination is clear. Now pick the route. Two distinct activities, and keeping them apart is the whole trick.

Generate. Working from the Objective and the challenges, produce as many ideas as you can, with no evaluating. Teams fall in love with the first good idea and it is rarely the best one.

Choose. Now bring back the requirements and wants from step zero and use them: requirements eliminate, wants rank. Turn the survivors into strategies, each written as one choice with a direction, and appoint an owner for each one in the room rather than afterwards by email.

Aim for at most five substantive strategies and two preconditions. And write the other list: what you are no longer doing. That list is often where the real clarity lives.

Step 4: the Measures

This step works best as homework plus a session, not as a workshop.

Before the session, each strategy owner drafts the KPIs and actions for their own strategy. They know it best, and drafting it is what makes ownership real.

In the session, owners present their drafts, the team gives feedback, and you prioritise the actions by scoring them on added value and feasibility rather than on who argues most persuasively. Then tighten the wording, confirm owners and set deadlines.

Finally, add up the actions and compare them with the capacity you actually have. The first version of an action list is almost never realistic. Cut until it is.

How long it takes

Three sessions gets a team to a solid first version. Spread them over a few weeks so people have time to think between them, and so the homework actually happens. Some teams do it in a single intense day; others take a month.

What matters more than the calendar is that you stop at “good enough” rather than chasing perfect. Better to execute an eighty percent plan really well than a hundred percent plan indifferently.

And before you close the last session, do one more thing: put the review sessions in the calendar for the next twelve months. Everything you have just written depends on those happening.

How the rhythm works: doing, learning and adjusting → · Two complete examples →