An objective's quality is decided before the workshop where you write it

This episode is entirely about what happens before the meeting where the objectives are created. The premise sounds uncomfortable for anyone who likes workshops: the wording itself is only a fraction of success, and the rest lies in the preparation. The first thing you need on the table is a direction. Not a thick document, but an answer to the question of which way the organisation is heading in the near future. If you don't have your strategy written down, you bring what you have: market data and signals from clients. A workshop without that material doesn't produce objectives, only wishes, because there is nothing to derive them from.

The second thing is the retrospective of the previous period, and not as a ritual that closes the quarter but as the input to the next one. What we are playing with today, what the biggest problem was, what we don't want to repeat. The third thing concerns the participants, though not their number, but what they come with. We ask everyone to put their list on a shared board before the meeting: what matters to them, what objective they propose, how they want to measure it and where it comes from. Along with that goes an agenda that says plainly what will happen and what we expect from each participant. Thanks to that the session starts with a conversation about priorities, not with filling an empty board. If there is nobody in the team who can lead that conversation, it is worth bringing in a facilitator who knows the method and can ask a guiding question.

There is one more thing that only shows with company-level objectives: they almost always cut across several departments at once. An objective around client satisfaction touches delivery, sales, which builds expectations before the contract is even signed, and administration, which closes the cooperation. A change in just one of those places won't move the indicator, because each holds only a piece. We made a mistake here ourselves at the start: we had no shared objective either at the level of the organisation or at the level of the leaders, and each division wrote its own. What fixed it was moving to one shared objective, set together by leaders from different areas. The last thing concerns agreement. In a larger group full unanimity is rare, and it isn't the threshold. It is enough for someone to say plainly that they disagree but understand the value and will do it. A disagreement spoken out loud is valuable information, too: it means that either something is wrong or there is something we don't know yet.