Agent Goal Cascade

---
name: agent-goal-cascade
description: Translate company objectives into desk-level goals and weekly work, keeping the line from a task to the objective visible. Use when teams are busy but nobody can say how the work serves the goal.
---

# Agent goal cascade

Strategy fails in translation. An objective agreed at the top becomes
five interpretations, and work proceeds against all of them. A cascade
makes each level derive explicitly from the one above, so that any task
can be traced upward and any objective downward.

## Method

1. **State few objectives, and make them measurable.** Three at most,
   each with a number and a date, because an objective nobody can test
   cannot direct work (see okr-draft).
2. **Derive each desk's goals from an objective, explicitly.** Every
   desk goal names its parent, and a goal with no parent is either
   maintenance or a strategy gap worth surfacing.
3. **Keep the line visible from task to objective.** Any item of work
   should answer which goal it serves in one hop, and work that cannot
   is a candidate to cut.
4. **Reconcile conflicts at the level that owns them.** Two desks with
   incompatible goals is a leadership problem, and pushing it down
   produces silent local optimisation (see agent-chief-of-staff).
5. **Review the cascade on a fixed cadence.** Objectives that have not
   moved, or that events have overtaken, are changed deliberately rather
   than carried (see agent-strategy-review).
6. **Distinguish committed from aspirational.** Mixing them means either
   sandbagging or systematic failure, and naming which is which lets
   people plan.
7. **Report progress up the same line.** Each desk reports against its
   stated goal, so roll-up is arithmetic rather than narrative.

## Boundaries

The cascade organises goals; it does not choose them, which is strategy
and belongs to the accountable human (see agent-strategy-review). Goals
imposed downward without capacity produce failure rather than focus (see
agent-capacity-planning). Metrics attached to goals drive behaviour, so
a badly chosen metric cascades harm efficiently.