I once asked the head of a small company what his goals were for the next three years. He answered confidently and beautifully: enter new markets, double revenue, build a strong brand. Then I asked his managers what they were working on that week. It turned out: closing current orders, handling complaints, preparing a report for accounting. Not one of these tasks was connected to what I had heard from the director. The company lived on two floors with no staircase between them.
This is a very common picture. The strategy exists in the founder's head and in the investor deck, while operational work exists on its own, in hamster-wheel mode. People are busy, everyone gets tired, but the company does not move where the director wanted. It moves wherever the current of daily tasks carries it.
Three floors of one tower
Classically, planning is divided into three levels, and I will not reinvent the wheel, because this division really works.
- Strategic. Where we are going in three to five years. What company we want to become, which markets to work in, what to sell, how to differ from competitors.
- Tactical. What we do this year to get closer to the strategic goal. Which projects we launch, which products we release, whom we hire, where we invest money.
- Operational. What needs to be done today and this week. Specific tasks, specific people, specific deadlines.
Picture an observatory tower. On the top floor stands a telescope through which you can see the distant star we are heading for. On the middle floor a navigator plots the route for the coming months. On the ground floor is the engine room, where gears turn and engines run. If the floors are not connected, the telescope looks at one star, the navigator plots a route to another, and the engine room simply turns gears out of habit.
Cascading from the top down
In an effective company goals cascade from the top down. This means that every operational task, if you pull its thread, leads to a tactical goal, and the tactical goal leads to a strategic one. A programmer building an integration with a new payment system today should understand (or at least his manager should understand for him) that it is needed to enter another country's market, and entering that market is part of the five-year strategy.
It sounds obvious, but in practice the link breaks all the time. The strategy is written once a year at an off-site, framed on the wall and forgotten. Tactics are shaped by whatever screams the loudest. Operations by whatever landed in the inbox this morning. And at some point it turns out that over a year the company completed two hundred tasks, none of which brought it closer to its goal.
A simple test: take ten random tasks from your team's tracker and try to answer, for each one, "which goal for the year does this move forward". If more than half move nothing, you have no cascade. You have well-organised fuss.
Cascading from the bottom up
There is also the reverse direction, which textbooks write less about. Information must rise from the bottom up. The engine room sees what cannot be seen through the telescope: the engine is overheating, fuel is running out faster than calculated, one of the gears is worn down. If this information does not reach the top floor, the strategy is built on fantasies.
I have seen companies where the director set growth targets year after year while the operational managers knew the current infrastructure would not withstand that growth. But nobody asked, and they did not dare to say it themselves. In the end the growth came, and the system collapsed under the load. Good planning is a dialogue between floors, not an order from above.
Different horizons, different precision
Another thing worth understanding: each level has its own acceptable precision. A five-year strategy cannot be precise. If someone shows you a five-year plan accurate to the month, that is not planning, that is literature. Strategy sets the direction: the star we are heading towards.
A tactical plan for the year is more concrete but must also leave room for manoeuvre. I recommend reviewing it every quarter. An operational plan for the week must be precise: who, what, by when.
The mistake many companies make is trying to plan strategy with operational precision or, conversely, running operations as vaguely as strategy. The first creates an illusion of control, the second creates chaos.
Tools that connect the floors
For a small company one single-page document is enough: three to five strategic goals, under each two or three goals for the year, under each annual goal a list of key projects. Once a week at the stand-up, look at which tasks work towards these projects. Once a quarter, review the annual goals. Once a year, the strategic ones.
For a bigger company this will not be enough, and you need a system where the links between levels are visible not on paper but in the data. In Forma we build this by linking projects, tasks and metrics: the director sees how many resources actually go to each goal, not how many he thought were going. It is often the most sobering discovery for a director.
What to do this week
Write down the company's three main goals for the next three years. If you cannot phrase them in ten minutes, that is the first job to do. Then, for each goal, write down what has to happen this year. And finally, look at your team's tasks for this week and check how many of them are linked to anything you wrote.
The result will most likely surprise you. But it is a good surprise, because it shows where to put the staircase between the floors. And once the staircase is there, the engine room starts moving the tower towards the star instead of just heating the air.
