Five Sensemaking Principles for Goal Setting

I’ve spent a lot of my career working on goal setting in one form or another: designing it, running it, simplifying it, rebuilding it.

I’ve done that in two very large, very different companies. I’ve worked with people who learned OKRs from Andy Grove. I’ve also worked through periods when company strategy was changing fast enough to make front page news. We put an enormous amount of process around this stuff. But the underlying questions are actually pretty basic. For all the systems, cascades, templates, deadlines, and terminology we layer into goal setting, people are usually just trying to answer a handful of questions:

• What matters?

• What does that mean for me?

• What do I own?

• How do we stay aligned?

Reflecting on my past experiences, I’m now thinking about goal setting as more of a sensemaking system. A few principles I keep coming back to:

1. People need enough line of sight to strategy to make good decisions. Not everyone needs the same depth of strategic context. But people need enough to make smart choices about priorities and tradeoffs.

2. Communicate strategy directly; translate relevance locally. I’ve become increasingly skeptical of the idea that alignment comes from passing goals neatly down through layer after layer of an organization (the dreaded cascade). Managers should be an interpretation layer, not a transmission chain.

3. Accountability requires clear ownership, not duplicated goals. Copying the same goal into five different places doesn’t necessarily create alignment. Sometimes it just makes ownership harder to see.

4. Structure should scaffold leadership, not substitute for it. If managers and leaders can’t create clarity without another template, deadline, or system requirement, the answer may not be more process.

5. The system should earn its maintenance cost. Goal setting takes time. Entering goals, updating them, reviewing them, rewriting them when priorities change. That effort should create enough clarity, coordination, or accountability to justify itself.

Good goal setting is less about cascading goals and more about creating enough shared context for people to make good decisions. That feels less like a process-design problem to me, and more like a sensemaking problem.