Short-term (i.e. quarterly) sub-goals can authorize teams to get creative, and define work that drives the changes needed to achieve the goals. These work plans are created, owned, and executed by the teams. Leaders in the context can then assess the plans for risk, and actively monitor and help mitigate these risks.
When the uncertainty is low, the identified opportunities can yield short-term goals and work quite easily. In this setting, leaders don’t need to structure and drive deliberative decisions to connect strategy to execution.
When the uncertainty is high, however, leaders must make difficult choices, and bring more of an experimental mindset to the planning and execution of work, using approaches like Value Engineering.
When opportunities are shrouded in uncertainty, leaders can plot the way forward with a Hypothesis. This format acknowledges the uncertainty while proposing measurable, short-term Sub-Goals. When these sub-goals are committed, we call this a Bet. The bet sets constraints on the size of work to be built into plans, and sets clear expectations on the desired feedback.
With a hypothesis driving the communication, leaders and teams put their heads together to experiment, and find ways to buy information at low cost (i.e. small bets). This shifts the higher focus to the pursuit of learning, not just the definition of work.
Exercise:
With or without a set of active hypotheses, the context leaders introduce a set of short-term sub-goals to the teams, to drive planning. When the plans emerge, the context leadership reviews them, to assess risk. For larger plans, they might use a Pre-Mortem to support risk identification.
From these plan reviews, context leadership builds and maintains a risk register to support a periodic Risk and Assumptions Review Ceremony.
Exercise:
