How We Set Our Goals For The Next Quarter

Last week the whole Sense team were together in London. We gathered for the Sense Supperclub and took the opportunity during the week to review what we’d achieved so far in 2018, set some goals for what we want to focus on in the next few months and plan how we’re going to get there.

Here we lift the lid on our conversations and tell you what goals we’re going to be focusing on in the next quarter.

The team coming together to set the goals for the next quarter.

Where we’ve come from. What we’ve done.

Last Tuesday afternoon we sat down as a team to reflect on what we’d achieved in the first few months of 2018. It’s been a very busy time so it was refreshing to be able to reflect on the things we’d done and progress made so far.

Within the business, our day to day time is spent working across four core areas:

Talent & Team
Growth and Delivery
Marketing
The Sense Network

In our reflection, we kept the process light touch, and asked ourselves “what progress have we made as a business”?

Taking the four core areas in turn we each wrote our reflections on Post-It notes and put them on four labelled boards. This highlighted progress and aired successes that we’d identified individually but could share in collectively.

With six people reflecting on four core areas of work we generated 34 reflections on things we were proud to have achieved.

Some highlights include:

Courtney joining the core team as a Consultant
The central role of the Sense Network in all our client projects (it wasn’t always that way!)
Sending out the first Sense newsletter in nearly 3 years

These achievements were celebrated with a well earned cleansing ale and it was agreed by a majority of 5:1 that rugby is a far superior sport to football.

Where we’re heading. What our goals are.

Goals for the road ahead

Wednesday came and we turned to future gazing. What did we each think the business should strive for in the next few months? These conversations highlighted what is important to us individually and what we hope the business will achieve.

We returned our attention to the four core areas of the business. Again, taking each area in turn we scribbled on Post-It notes (notice a trend here?!) and captured our ambitions for the business. We asked ourselves “what do we hope to be able to say we’ve achieved” in the next 3 months?

With the team of six reconvened and writing down our ambitions for each of the four core areas we generated 67 goals that we wanted to work towards in the next 3 months.

There were some overarching goals that we are already working towards, want to do more consistently and know will help to power the business in the coming months and years.

We want to do better work. Went want to be faster. We want to do it more profitably. These are essential principles for any ambitious business to strive for. They’ll form the basis for questions we’ll continually ask ourselves.

We want to experiment with discipline. We’ve always had an experimental culture at Sense. It’s important to us and we’re taking it seriously. Experimentation is how we will make better decisions about what to prioritise, what to develop, what to let go.

There are plenty more goals that see come to fruition in the coming months. Others we’ll be working on behind the scene.

What we’ll focus on. How we’ll get there.

There was no let up come the end of the week. We reconvened on Friday to take stock of the goals we’d shared and prioritise the jobs to be done.

We had a lot to get through so this meeting was fast-paced and highly focused. One team member (looking at you Emma) had been saving stray dogs the night before and was waiting for the rescue van to arrive. Emma dialled into the meeting via Zoom with the rest of us gathered around the four boards we’d populated with Post-It notes earlier in the week.

We collectively reviewed the goals generated on Wednesday and marked up which ones we felt were most important to focus on. There was an energised discussion from which emerged 9 priority goals that we have chosen to work on over the next 3 months.

With our shortlist priority goals agreed, we turned our attention to working out all the different tasks that would need to be worked through to achieve each goal. Neil led a 6 minute sprint (ably timed by Courtney) on each of the four core areas. The aim was to provide a rough sketch of the building blocks for achieving each goal.

For the curious among you, here’s our shortlist of goals and who’s going to be working on each one.

Experiment with discipline – Neil, Courtney
Enable a successful team culture to flourish – Courtney, Eve
Develop mentoring for all team members – Alex, Neil
Produce a weekly newsletter – Emma, Eve
Create a feedback loop with our clients and Network – Emma, all
Identify and implement the best reward mechanism for Sense Network members – Alex, Jeremy
Grow the Sense Network membership – Jeremy, Emma
Develop 3 testable product propositions for clients – Jeremy, all
Develop a turnkey product proposition for the Sense Network – Neil, Alex

We’ll report back on our progress in the coming months.

If you’d like to chat meeting planning, goal setting, cleansing ales or even the outstanding merits of rugby then get in touch as we’d love to hear from you.