The Goal represents a balance between the modern demands to be customer-centric, with the implicit expectations that we’re running a sustainable business.

The Goal

We should always aim to be customer-centric. Whether your Customer is external to the organisation, or internal should not matter. Because, as highlighted with the internal challenge of mindset; happy internal customers (i.e. staff), leads to happy external customers, and happy external customers, leads to happy shareholders!

We must be careful not to create a pattern of giving the Customer everything they ask for, just to make them happy. Because we are likely to be setting an unrealistic expectation, and a situation that in the long term is unsustainable for the organisation.

The three targets within The Goal, offer the chance to have a careful balance.

Sometimes, the speed targets are very fast, and sometimes they are not.

For consistency, sometimes a quality criteria to be compliant with regulation can take a high-priority, and yet in other contexts, there are no regulations.

Sustainability for a profit-driven organisation, would have very different targets, when compared with a government agency, or not-for-profit.

In this section, we will explore the three targets within The Goal in more detail. So that we can all understand, that without clearly defined, and achievable targets, we wouldn’t know how agile, or predictable our Product, or Service needs to be. Which means it would unwise to start allocating resources, on building, or improving it.


Enabling a Multi-Speed Business

A Multi-Speed Business allows for variations between more agile and more predictable Goals (i.e. for regulation, safety, quality, maturity etc)

It can be useful to categorise your operating models, if you have many Product or Services, that will have different Goals.

For example, you may use three categories; such as high-velocity services, high-predictability services and a hybrid model.

Example of a Multi-Speed Business with three operating models.

This categorisation can help you to quickly identify and apply the operating model that is required for a Product/Service, as well gain efficiencies through the re-use of plans, and other assets.