The Goals Grid: A Tool for Clarifying Goals and Objectives

Several years back, a meeting of the Operations Executive Council in my company was focused on the five-year corporate planning effort then getting underway. At this meeting I distributed a simple framework for classifying, organizing, and analyzing goals and objectives (see the Goals Grid in Figure 1 below). My colleagues saw this framework as very useful and so I was led to present it to a wider audience in a 1992 article. The Goals Grid continues to be used and highly regarded by those who use it. It is an integral part of the problem solving approach I call "Solution Engineering."