Forget the plan. Becoming starts with a story.

Under pressure, organisations narrow to metrics and targets, and quietly lose the story of who they're trying to become. This article explores the difference between strategy and becoming, why HARD goals matter as much as SMART ones, and how a vivid picture of the future keeps direction alive when conditions won't cooperate.

One change at a time

Most of us start a new year the same way: a list of goals, a handful of promises, a year mapped out with optimism. Most of those intentions don't survive January.

A while ago I tried something different with my own goals. Instead of a grand overhaul, I chose one change with the biggest potential impact, something simple but hard enough to take real effort to interrupt, and I let it settle until it was embedded. Only then did I layer in the next one, and then the next. Small, stackable steps, each simple enough to flex when life changed, and each chosen because it compounds over time.

What made it work wasn't the sequencing, though. Each habit was anchored to a future I'd pictured clearly. Not metrics, or even outcomes, but a sense of who I wanted to be: how I wanted to feel, what I wanted to be able to do, and what energy I wanted to bring home. A future vivid enough to make the effort worth it.

That's the same pattern I see in organisations that hold direction well.

How we see the future at work

In organisations, telling a story about the future isn't hard, and it can take many shapes. But it needs to be vivid, clear and engaging, and it needs to land most strongly with the people who matter most. Customers and stakeholders, yes, but above all, your own people.

I've led future-state work when there was time and space: whole-of-organisation processes over months, exploring values, purpose and the difference we wanted to make. Sessions where directors imagined success twenty years out, not as KPIs but as stories. What would people say about us if we'd done what we came here to do? What would we have protected, learned and changed? Those fragments were synthesised into a single narrative, an anchor, before any planning began.

I've also done the same work with almost no space at all: operating models built across eight one-hour sessions squeezed between meetings, and constitutional documents passed between a few capable hands to meet hard deadlines. Different formats, different constraints, same responsibility: create a story and set a direction people can buy into, whether conditions are favourable or refusing to cooperate.

When we give up on the story

Pressure changes everything. Our view narrows, we optimise for immediate needs, and we focus on surviving. Metrics feel reassuring, targets feel clarifying, and KPIs feel like control. Sometimes that's exactly what's needed to live to trade another day.

But there's a quiet cost. You can survive on metrics alone, but you can't become anything meaningful without a shared story of who you're here to be.

Most of us have been in organisations where the focus narrowed to a small set of numbers: turnaround targets, sales, quality metrics, the bottom line. Long-term conversations were postponed, and questions about who we were and the difference we wanted to make kept getting pushed out. You meet the metrics. What you lose, and later work hard to recover, is meaning.

In for-purpose organisations, that loss cuts deep. People didn't join for the numbers; they joined to make a difference. When they can no longer see how their work connects to it, they disengage or leave. The greatest loss of survival-mode leadership isn't missed targets. It's people, and the opportunities you never see because you've stopped looking beyond the next step.

Strategy and becoming

This is why I'm careful not to conflate strategy and becoming.

Strategy is the evolving pattern of choices we make over time. It should flex and adapt. Becoming is the future we're moving toward, shaped by our values, history, ambition and purpose. It changes more slowly than strategy, and it should. When becoming is clear, strategy can move without second-guessing. When it isn't, everything feels up for negotiation.

HARD goals and SMART goals

This is also where the distinction between SMART and HARD goals matters. SMART goals are familiar: they organise effort and provide clarity, accountability and milestones. HARD goals, articulated by Mark Murphy, do different work:

• Heartfelt: meaningful, not sentimental
• Animated: energising, not compliance-based
• Required: necessary, not optional
• Difficult: involving challenge, learning and stretch

SMART goals organise how we execute. HARD goals organise why the effort is worth it.

In the most effective work I've led, teams didn't start with targets. They started with stories. If we were successful, what would people be saying? How would the team feel? What would we have learned, and what would we be proud to have held onto? From those stories came the indicators, and from the indicators came the actions.

It's the same approach I took with my own goals: start with the future you want to see, make it vivid, then take the highest-impact step first and let the next ones follow. You stop tracking rules and start tracking trajectory, checking each decision against the future you're trying to realise.

Invest in direction

Spending time and resource on plans and strategy documents that become obsolete within months misses the point. We need to invest more in direction: in becoming, and in making that future vivid enough for people to care. And in strategy as the accumulation of decisions made daily, weekly and monthly in service of that future.

Change that rhythm, and you change outcomes.

Reflection

• Where are you executing well, but no longer clear on who you're trying to become?
• What future might need to be named again, rather than redesigned?
• How do you hold direction when there's space to think, and when there isn't?
• How do sound next steps still emerge when pressure squeezes that space?

Under pressure, organisations lose direction by focusing only on survival and forgetting who they're meant to become.