The Goal Tree, once built and scrutinized, is a benchmark as well as a roadmap. It describes all prerequisites that must be fulfilled in order to achieve the Goal, a Goal not yet achieved and (still) lying in (a distant) future.

The proposed good practice is to carefully craft and state the Goal, so that it can’t be discarded by conditions not met. Therefore a Goal Statement should not include a specific value for the targeted Goal, but a limit or a range instead. For a similar reason, no deadline is mentioned. The Goal can only be achieved once ALL the prerequisites are fulfilled, a point in time which can be tricky to forecast.

With the Goal Tree, all time-bound Intermediate Objectives (fulfilling the prerequisites or ensuring the Necessary Conditions are met) should be detailed in the action plan, not within the Goal Tree itself. The Goal Tree keeps being a benchmark and a roadmap, while the action plan copes with all the details for execution.

The advantage of doing so is that the Goal Tree and all the prerequisites remain valid, even if the deadline moves. The Goal Tree may be built differently if the Goal contains a short to mid-term deadline. If the deadline is pushed back, new possibilities might appear. If the deadline is moved closer, some options may disappear. In any of such case the Goal Tree is to be amended or even totally rebuilt!

A Goal Tree can be time-bound!

If the original idea behind the Goal Tree is to remain a benchmark and roadmap, and insensitive to minor changes and obstacles along the road to achieve the Goal, it is indeed possible to reduce the time horizon and challenge to achieve the Goal within a certain time.

It may be a smaller, more focused Goal Tree than a strategic Goal Tree, that aims – for example – to achieve the delivery of at least 10,000 technowidgets a month within 8 months (when the current score is around 7,000 a month).

Doing so, we use the scalability and fractal nature of the Goal Tree, which means its structure remains the same, regardless of the scale considered. A strategic Goal Tree for a large corporation has the very same structure as the one used to prepare the rollout of an quality improvement program in the machining shop of the D-Department of the Indonesian factory, and the same structure when I prepare the Work Breakdown Structure of a small project with my team.

My advice

Facing the challenge to achieve a Goal before a given deadline, I would first evaluate how flexible the deadline is, that is how likely it may change. If the term is fixed and not likely to change at all, say the project must be ready for the next Olympic games, I would state the Goal with the deadline and work out the details accordingly.

If there is a possibility for the deadline to be changed, I would not include it in the statement, but manage execution so that the deadline is met.