Goals Grid
The Goals Grid sorts anything you want, have, or are carrying into four honest categories - Achieve, Preserve, Avoid, Eliminate - by asking two plain yes/no questions instead of a fuzzy importance score.
Two questions branch into four quadrants, each one labelled with what to do once you know the answers.
Reach for this when…
- The goal list has grown long and some items are really about keeping something, not chasing something.
- A stakeholder keeps pushing a goal that turns out to be about avoiding a risk, not achieving a result.
- You need a fast, shared way to sort a messy list of goals without a scoring argument.
How to run it
- List everything currently sitting on the goal list, including problems and things you're protecting.
- For each one, answer plainly: do you want it? Yes or no.
- For each one, answer plainly: do you have it already? Yes or no.
- Place it in its box: Achieve (want, don't have), Preserve (want, have), Avoid (don't want, don't have), Eliminate (don't want, have).
- Handle each box differently - Achieve needs a plan, Preserve needs defending, Avoid needs watching, Eliminate needs acting on.
A worked example
Situation. Lukas Brunner ran Brauerei Brunner, a craft brewery in Graz, Austria, with a goal list that had grown to fourteen items after a planning offsite nobody had prioritised since.
Applied. Running it through the grid, a bigger canning line was an Achieve (wanted, didn't have yet), the loyal taproom crowd was a Preserve he'd been taking for granted, a rival's rumoured price war was an Avoid worth watching rather than reacting to, and a costly out-of-town warehouse lease turned out to be an Eliminate he'd simply never questioned.
Result. He funded the canning line as a named Achieve goal, put a proper loyalty programme around the taproom regulars instead of assuming they'd stay, and gave notice on the warehouse lease that had been quietly draining cash for two years.
The catch
The two questions look simple but people fudge them - 'sort of want it' gets forced into a yes that flatters the answer they'd already picked. The grid sorts goals into a type, it doesn't set priority between them: two Achieve goals can both be urgent and the grid won't tell you which comes first.
If you can't honestly answer 'do you have it?' about something, it isn't ready for this grid - go find out first.
Origin: Fred Nickols