The Goal Tree is a very powerful tool and a favorite of mine, yet very little known. I had the pleasure to moderate the building of two Goal Trees in the very first months of 2022. One in particular was built as the roadmap to achieve the strategic performance objective in manufacturing of a small-sized company aiming to become big, a scale-up.

What was very special about this Goal Tree is that it was built, scrutinized (stress tested for its logical soundness and completeness) and colored (assessing the actual state vs. the benchmark) in less than 10 hours, whereas the usual duration required is nearly double.

Builder team and moderation

Given the circumstances, it was not possible to gather a multi skilled team and lock it up for 2 full days building the tree. It had to be done in smaller chunks of time in order not to interfere with current activities.

I selected a core team of 6 people to build the Tree and later invited more people for the scrutinizing. This core team was chosen among the young executives and middle management. The builders gathered during about 2 hours in 4 sessions, building the Tree on brown paper with sticky notes. I captured the result in a big PowerPoint slide for easy sharing between sessions.

My role as moderator was to help with the logic rules, making sure that the good practices and rules in building the Tree were granted, and also challenging the wording and entities contents. However, as I was not very knowledgeable in their business, the builders remained the true experts with regard to the content.

The nearly completed Goal Tree counted about 80 entities (Necessary Conditions or Prerequisites) and was presented ‘in white’ to the scrutinizing team, printed on a A0 paper, which is a standard European size, 841 x 1188 mm or 33-1/8 x 46-13/16 in.

In white means that the entities in the Tree weren’t colored to display their actual status, according to “my” color code. Learn more about the color code in this article: Goal Tree Chronicles – Coloring the Goal Tree

The scrutinizers made minor changes in wording, detected two or three duplicate entities and then colored the entities according to their évaluation of the current state. The result did fairly well overlap the builders’ évaluation.

The final colored version of the Tree is this one. The entities are blurred for confidentiality reasons (and are written in French anyway!).

The reasons for such a speedy building

Coming up with a Goal Tree that big, completed, reviewed and colored in less than 10 hours was a first time for me. The reasons for such a speedy yet very qualitative building were:

• Acceptance and strong commitment to the assigned objective (Goal), which means there was no philosophical discussion nor dispute about it
• Accepted and respected leadership (2 leading people) 
• Great cohesion among builders, working seamlessly together
• Kindness and respect, as well as discipline
• Deep knowledge of operations, commercial and technical aspects of business

Until then I was more used to moderate and lead senior management executives teams through this kind of exercise, with a somewhat more strategic than operational scope and intent. Those teams were more prone to argue, contradict, show muscles, and willing to push their ideas than this operational staff.

From my experience, senior management team members are often less cohesive and more selfish than this last group truly engaged to make the scale-up succeed.

My standard offer

As a freelance consultant, I keep offering my help for defining and cascading strategy, with the Goal Tree as a roadmap, benchmark and visual management tool. The standard format I propose is a two-day full time and preferably off-site seminar.

The seminar starts with a crash course on the Goal Tree, its usages and benefits, how to build a Tree, the rules of logic governing it, how to assess the current situation vs. the Goal Tree, followed by the building of a Goal Tree to achieve the organization’s Goal.

By the end of the second day, a robust Goal Tree is ready to be shared with the CEO or any stakeholders, in white or colored, i.e. without or with current situation assessment. I usually suggest preparing a colored version but present the Goal Tree “in white”, and invite the audience to color the presented Tree. A moment of truth is checking if the two colored versions overlap or not…