The goals you have to hit this year
Most leaders have two or three must-hit objectives that actually matter this year. What are yours?
Evolving your business model? Cost transformation that funds growth? AI ROI? Org design-driven agility and efficiency? All popular right now.
We can make it more likely you achieve your big goals.
Everyone knows simplicity comes at a cost.
You wonder why the company isn't more entrepreneurial. Why what you sell looks like what everybody else sells. Why every team's plan is last year, improved.
Look at the culture and the hiring and you'll usually find both are fine. Generic goal guidance is written for the average case, and the average case is getting a bit better at something you already do. So the template asks for a target and a date. The review asks whether you're on track. Green is good.
Incremental improvement. Getting measurably better at the thing you already do.
Finding out whether something new works, because new work produces bad numbers before it produces good ones.
One shape is easier to sell.
One approach to setting a goal is easier to explain, easier to certify, easier to put in a tool, and much easier to sell. That's why almost everyone sells one.
Using a portfolio asks you to develop judgement, which feels complicated and looks like hard work. So how you execute strategy, run teams and evaluate performance has been dumbed down. And it works against exactly what you need more of now than ever: people thinking differently, and taking a proper swing at something original.
The simple version works fine. But you don't get an entrepreneurial company by asking people to be more entrepreneurial. You get one by optimising the system for it where it matters. And where you need more of what already works, sometimes better and sometimes faster, you optimise for that as well.
Both are deliberate. Both are a design choice.
Precision instruments, not one template.
Variable approaches, inside the same company and often inside the same team, designed backwards from what success really means for that particular piece of work.
That sounds like more work than it is. Most teams can already tell which kind of work they're doing. A team keeping the lights on knows, and so does a team betting the year on something untested.
What they don't have is permission to use the right instrument. And their leaders aren't evaluating with the right instrument either. So we train leaders on what excellent looks like, and how to use a small collection of precision instruments to optimise for what they actually need to achieve.
Built on what you already do, not a replacement for it.
The way we work is simple. We look at how you set and pursue goals today, and we find the changes that shift the odds.
No frameworks preached at you, no cascades. We want to understand the business you're in, and how you actually operate today. Then we recommend specific changes that act as forcing functions and multipliers, making the behaviours you need more likely to happen.
A European tech company asked us to improve how their strongest teams set goals. A look at what they did today: a few conversations, a little training, two short workshops, and now goal setting earns its time and place on these teams’ calendars. It's no longer perceived as admin for the SLT. It's how good ideas get surfaced, funded and turned into value.
Most frameworks get you to a grade C.
That's where the majority sit, and it's not a disaster. Tuning them to how your people are actually wired, and to the context each team works in, is the harder part. That's where most of the value is left on the table.
We've spent a decade on that specific problem. Not many people have had the luxury of that focus.
The upside of getting this right
- ✓Execute your strategy to win your market, niche, or geography
- ✓Choose, write and communicate better goals
- ✓Make your highest-performing teams even better
- ✓Transform teams that are struggling
- ✓Make much faster goal progress
- ✓Give teams the skills to adapt to signals faster
- ✓Find and remove the hidden friction that's holding teams back
- ✓Use goals as the instrument and catalyst to improve psychological safety and innovation
- ✓Feel in total control of the org and where it's going
Answer, discuss, then read what we saw.
Three steps over about a fortnight, and only the middle one takes real time.
The pre-meet questions
A few easy-to-answer questions. That way, the session starts with the interesting part rather than the setup.
The discussion questions
A working one-on-one or one-to-few. We push where the answers are interesting and skip where they aren't. We record it and run an AI transcript, so nobody takes notes, and you get both afterwards.
The report
A written read on the opportunity: where the way you operate is costing you speed or focus, what we would change first, and what we would leave well alone. Yours to use, with us or without us.
Matt Roberts runs every session.
Not a researcher, not a junior, and not a rotating cast. Matt founded ZOKRI and has spent ten years installing this way of working inside leadership teams. That's why the questions are short and the follow-ups are not.
He also writes the report, so the person who heard the answers is the person telling you what they mean.
Things we hear, and help solve, most weeks.
“Our best teams don't think they need goals. To them it's admin.”
“We did OKRs and never got the lift we expected.”
“We have too many priorities and I can't bring myself to cut any.”
“We have had several bad quarters, so something has to change. Let us take an honest, objective look at how we operate.”
“The strategy is clear in my head. I'm less sure it's clear three levels down.”
“Planning takes six weeks and by the time we finish, it's already stale.”
“Everything waits for me. I can't take two weeks off without it stalling.”
“My leadership team agrees in the room and diverges the moment they leave it.”
All of them are common, and trying harder has never fixed one. They are the sort of thing the three questions pull into the open.
Seven common questions.
What is this, exactly? +
45 minutes with ZOKRI, working through three questions about how your company actually runs. You answer a short questionnaire beforehand, we talk it through live, and five working days later you get a written set of recommendations for operating more effectively. It costs nothing and there's nothing to buy at the end of it.
Why the same three questions every time? +
Because comparison is the point, first against yourself and then against everyone else who has sat in the chair. The questions are the ones we ask in the first week of a paid engagement, and they are published above so you can use them without us if you would rather.
What is in the report? +
The opportunity, in plain terms: where the way you operate is costing you speed or focus, what we would change first, and what we would leave alone. Specific to your answers, not a template with your logo on it. Usually two to three pages, with you in five working days.
Is this a sales call in disguise? +
It's a real working session, and it's also how we meet people. We won't pitch you in it, send a proposal after it, or drop you in a follow-up sequence. Some leaders read the report, see the value and come back to us. That's entirely their move, and most don't make it. The report, the recording and the transcript arrive either way.
Should I do this on my own or with my team? +
Either works. On your own, the answers are what you actually think rather than what the room agrees on. With your senior leadership team, the same questions surface where you quietly disagree, which is usually where the opportunity is. If the team comes, everyone answers the pre-meet questions separately and nobody sees anyone else’s until we are in the room.
What do I need to prepare? +
Nothing beyond the questionnaire, which is short and asks only for things you already know. No deck, no data pull, no pre-read. If a question needs you to open a file, that's a finding in itself.
Is it recorded? +
Yes, and the recording is yours. You get the video and an AI transcript with the report, so your leadership team can watch it back or the people who weren't there can hear it first-hand. It's never published or shared with anyone else, and if you would rather work without one we turn it off.
Come and tell us how you operate.
It takes a bit of nerve to have your operating model questioned. It takes some of ours to do it live, for free, with no idea what we'll find. That's the deal, and it's why the conversation is worth having.
It's free, and we keep one slot a day for it, so the diary fills a few weeks out. Twenty minutes on a call first, so you know exactly what is coming and can decide afterwards. Matt books the session while you're on the call.
What changes while we're working with you
And a lot of them come from people and teams you weren't expecting.
They get looked at properly and answered, so the next lot arrives too. Nobody's idea disappears into a drive.
Real decisions about what becomes a goal, and where the money and the people go.
Then each goal gets built for what it actually is. If the point is to find something out, it's set up to find something out, rather than to deliver a number somebody guessed at in a planning meeting.
The things that annoyed people and slowed you down are gone.
The things that speed you up have been added instead.
It stops being the goal-setting thing and becomes how the company works.
Which is also the point at which it stops needing us.
More ideas, better choices, quicker learning, and a lot more people who can see where they contributed.
That last one does more for how the place feels than everything else on the list put together.
Three reasons this can't be you
Getting help here isn't weakness. It's arithmetic.
Everything in there looks normal, because it's just how things get done here.
You can't diagnose a system you're standing inside.
None of you can chair that conversation cleanly.
Which few things to actually do is a decision you and your SLT all have skin in. We have watched bias dilute the right answer more times than we can count.
There's no professional body for this one.
Lawyers have a body that trains them and holds them to a standard. Anyone designing how a company plans, measures, judges and rewards has a management qualification that skipped it, a book or two, and what they saw work somewhere else.
Patterns, gotchas, slides, templates, agenda and hours, mostly. Duller than it sounds.
You have a day job that fills all of yours. This is ours, and it's what our success gets measured on. We've seen what works and what doesn't at scale, so we can match it to your context rather than hand you the average, and we know which versions hold when a quarter goes badly.
The diagnostics, the learning assets and the people to run a programme already exist, with a human in the loop at every point that matters.
These are what's missing almost everywhere. Each one is a piece of work with a name, in the order it tends to happen.
Then step seven loops back to the design, which is what stops it being a project with an end date.
Already running OKRs? Get an objective read on the implementation: the OKR Implementation Review, free, 45 minutes.