Spot the broken goal before you write one · From Zero to Goals, lesson 1 of 17
How this course works
- Seventeen lessons, one company
You run Brightside, a twelve-person agency, through a full year of its quarters.
- Decisions, not definitions
Every lesson puts a real choice in front of you, then tells you what it cost.
- Then the same thing on your own goals
Three exercises score your own mission, your own goal, and a cascade you build.
- Progress is saved as you go
In this browser, with nothing to sign up for. A free account keeps it across devices.
- It ends with a real exam
Fifteen scenario questions, twelve to pass, and a certificate with a public address.
Spot the broken goal before you write one
Recognize the five ways goals fail, so you can diagnose any goal in a minute, including your own.
Spot the broken goal before you write one
Doctors learn on pathology before they treat anyone, because you cannot fix what you cannot recognize. Goals work the same way: most teams do not fail at achieving goals, they fail at writing them, and nobody in the room can say why the sentence on the board will not survive the quarter.
In this lesson you meet Brightside (a 12-person agency you will run for the rest of this course) on the day its founder writes five goals on a whiteboard. Four of them are broken, each in a different way. By the end you will be able to name all four failures on sight.
Five sentences on a whiteboard
January. Dana, Brightside’s founder, kicks off the year with the team and writes five goals on the board:
1 · “Launch the new website.”
2 · “Increase client satisfaction.”
3 · “Reach 10,000 LinkedIn followers.”
4 · “Improve internal communication.”
5 · “Grow from 3 to 8 retainer clients by June · owner: Dana.”
The team nods at all five. Nodding is easy: every one of these sounds reasonable said out loud.
Only one of the five is a goal as written. Which?
The rewrite round
Two days later Dana comes back with the board, version two. The four broken sentences have been rewritten:
1 · “Inbound demo requests from 12 to 25 a month by June · owner: Priya. The new website ships in April as step one.”
2 · “Client NPS at 50 or higher by June · owner: Sam.”
3 · “Marketing-sourced retainer conversations from 1 to 4 per quarter · owner: Leo.”
4 · “Every client project posts a written weekly status by Friday, eight weeks in a row · owner: Sam.”
The team nods again. But one of these four still fails the list, and it is the failure Brightside dodged in round one.
One rewrite still fails. Which?
The five ways goals fail
From now on, every goal in this course, including the ones you write about your own company, gets held against this list first. Diagnosis is the cheap half: a goal you reject on Monday costs nothing, a goal you discover was broken in week nine costs a quarter.
Write down your goal, broken or not
Write ONE goal your team has right now, exactly as it exists today: from your head, your doc, or your tracker. Do not improve it yet. In lesson 1.4 you will run it through the checker; diagnosis works better when the patient has not been coached.
Saved in this browser only. Keep it on a free account and it stops depending on this one.
More on diagnosing goals
All optional, and none of it is needed for the certificate. Each opens in a new tab, so your place in the lesson is kept.
- The most common goal-setting mistakes ↗The same five failures seen from the other end: what teams actually get wrong, and how it looks from the inside.4 min read
- A goal-setting process for small teams ↗The whole cycle end to end, if you would rather see the map before walking it lesson by lesson.5 min read