Goals and gap analysis

Welcome to the final stage.

You have made the major strategic decisions: essence, positioning, expression. Before we build the roadmap, one discipline stands between strategy and motion, and most courses skip it, which is why most strategies stay in the drawer. You need to know what the strategy is trying to achieve, and what currently stands in the way. Goals, and gaps.

Strategy is only real when it sets a goal

Here is the principle this lesson runs on: strategy becomes real when it sets a goal, and a goal becomes honest when you have named the gap between you and it. Skipping the gap is how companies produce roadmaps full of activity that never quite becomes progress.

From vision to dated horizons

Your vision describes a future years away. Goals need a date. Before you choose any goals, walk back from the vision in three steps. Write what must be true in three years for the vision to be on track. Then write what must be true in one year for the three-year picture to be reachable. Then write what must be true in ninety days for the one-year picture to have started. Each horizon is shorter, more concrete and closer to something you can do on Monday.

For FieldArc, working back from a world that treats restored land as infrastructure: in three years, landowners in its home region name FieldArc first when restoration comes up, and funded projects are running on land it assessed. In one year, it has ten referenceable projects. In ninety days, the homepage message has been tested with landowners and the next assessments are booked. The goals come out of these horizons.

Choose up to three goals

Now choose the goals, and the rule is restraint: keep them few. Up to three strong strategic goals are worth more than ten vague intentions, for an unglamorous reason: goals exist to concentrate effort, and effort divided by ten concentrates nothing.

A goal earns the word strategic when it traces back to the strategy you have just built. Look at your positioning statement, your primary audience, your not-yet list from the advantage work, and your dated horizons: your goals are hiding in plain sight there. The position you chose implies what must become true for it to hold. The claims you could not yet make imply the evidence you must now build.

And make each goal specific enough that you would know whether you reached it. Grow our presence is a mood. Become the first platform our primary audience names when they consider restoration is a goal: you could test it in twelve months by asking them.

For every goal, name the gap

Now the gap, and this is the step that requires more honesty than analysis.

The gap is the distance between where the brand is now and where the goal requires it to be. Naming it means admitting, in writing where your team can see it, what is still missing. That is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it is valuable. A gap analysis that makes everything look nearly solved is reassurance, and reassurance has never closed a gap.

Close the gap with an action and an owner

From gap to motion: for every gap, name the action that closes it, the owner responsible, and how you will know it worked. Goal, baseline, measure, gap, action, owner. The baseline is where you are now; without it a goal cannot be judged. The measure is the observable thing that would tell you the goal has been reached: a number or an event you could point to. A feeling is too soft to count.

Make the action concrete enough to start on Monday. Close the gap by improving our brand presence would fall apart on contact with a Monday morning.

Then the owner. An action without an owner is a hope, and a strategy run on hopes is how twelve months disappear. If the honest owner of every action is the founder, that is fine, and it is also information: it tells you what the strategy can realistically attempt this year, which most plans never surface.

FieldArc goals and gaps example

Check yours

Write the full row for each of your goals: goal, baseline, measure, gap, action, owner. A few quality checks as you work.

Check the gap for honesty: would a sceptical advisor, reading it, say yes, that is the real situation? Check the action for traction: could it start within two weeks, and would your persona notice its effects? Check the owner for truth: one person's name. A department is too vague. And check the set for coherence: do these goals serve the same position, or are they quietly pulling the brand in different directions? Goals that fight each other are usually two strategies that never had the argument they needed to have. Better to have that argument on this page than in next year's results.

This page is the bridge between everything you have decided and everything you are about to do. The roadmap in the next lesson is simply the order in which you close these gaps.

Key takeaways

• Walk back from the vision: three years, one year, ninety days. Then choose up to three goals.
• Give every goal a baseline and a measure, and name the gap honestly.
• Goal, baseline, measure, gap, action, owner.

Do this now

• In the Goals and gap analysis section of your workbook, write what must be true in three years, one year and ninety days for your vision to be on track.
• Choose up to three strategic goals from those horizons, each traceable to your positioning or your not-yet list.
• For each goal, write the baseline you are starting from and the measure that would tell you it worked.
• Write the honest gap, including its layers if it has them, and the business outcome the goal makes possible.
• For each gap, name the action that closes it and the single owner responsible.
• Run the sceptical-advisor check on your gaps. If any reads as reassurance, rewrite it before moving on.