In most demos I’ve seen, Work is directly linked to Goals. However, many of the clients I speak with don’t have mature processes, and this approach comes with risks:
- Delivery tickets often lack broad context. Unless teams write summaries/descriptions with a wider audience in mind (which is rare in my experience), key strategic context can get lost.
- Alignment and evaluation become harder. Different teams work in different ways, making progress evaluation across an organization unreliable/inconsistent.
- Reporting is less reliable. Virtually every dashboard I see has a %-complete box based on "work done" which for my clients would basically never be accurate.
An Alternative Approach: Goals → Ideas → Work
For enterprises that need more structure—or frequently need to answer “Why are we doing this?”—another model could introduce an intermediate layer between Goals and Work:
- Goals (Outcomes) → Define what success looks like.
- Ideas (Options/Intent) → Possible ways to achieve the goal.
- Work (Execution/Delivery) → Tasks and stories that fulfill an idea.
Why?
- Clearer Strategic Intent – A concise way to express how you intend to achieve a goal, in what order, and over what timeframe.
- Dual Evaluation – Separately assess:
- Did our Ideas help us achieve our Goals?
- Did our Work effectively deliver on our Ideas?
- Better Traceability – Work items often don’t directly relate to outcomes. Instead, work items fulfill an intent (or just a part of it), while its the fulfilled intent that achieves the outcome.
- Better bottom-up alignment - Surfacing work through Ideas that embody intents makes it easier for non-technical stakeholders to understand progress, even if ticket descriptions vary across teams or are highly technical or both.
Has anyone tried this or something like it? Would love to hear how others approach this!
