You do not cut the ambition into pieces of work, you cut it into layers. Establish what the vision is, what the vision state over multiple years means, what the target for this year is, and what the target state precisely entails once that target has been reached. That turns one large ambition into a series of achievable steps that logically follow one another, instead of an annual plan that doesn't cover what's needed.
A management team that finds an ambition too large for one year often reaches for an action list: this year we do phase 1, next year phase 2. The problem is that nobody establishes what should actually be different at the end of phase 1. An organization of 120 employees that wanted to phase "growing internationally" split it into "year 1: strengthen the Netherlands, year 2: first country abroad". Logical on paper, but in practice it remained unclear whether "strengthening the Netherlands" was a revenue target, an organizational goal, or a precondition for the next country. Without that layer in between, everyone talks about something different using the same words, and that is exactly where different meanings behind the same words cause a phasing to grind to a halt before the first month is even over.
The vision does not change every year; it stays in place as a direction. The vision state is the image of the organization over three to five years once that vision becomes reality. The target is the intermediate stop: what concretely must be achieved this year to move toward that vision state. The target state is the detailed description of what the organization looks like once that target has been reached — which roles exist then, which customers, which way of working. Phasing does not arise by making the ambition smaller, but by formulating a separate target state for each year that logically builds on the previous one. In the example of international growth, that meant: year 1 received a target state with a concrete number of customers in the Netherlands and an established role for export preparation, not just the vague term "strengthening".
A target state written down solely by the management team quickly turns into a different story in the rest of the organization. That is why an ambition round does not stop at the management team: team leaders and specialists indicate what a target state practically means for their part of the organization, and where it clashes with what is already underway this year. At a production company of 200 employees, that round revealed that the planned target state for year 1 assumed a second production line that was only scheduled for year 2 — a phasing that was correct at management level but could not be executed on the shop floor without adjusting that sequence. Without that broad check, the phasing remains an assumption on paper, and that is one of the reasons why a strategy often remains a document instead of something worked on daily.
Each layer of the phasing is checked against eight dimensions — think of customer, process, people, money, technology — so that a target state is not only commercially sound but also organizationally achievable within the year allotted to it. Five confidence gates then determine whether the organization has sufficient confidence to move on to the next layer, or whether something needs to be sharpened first. That prevents a phasing from being convincing on paper but turning out, at the first check, to rest on shaky assumptions, such as capacity that does not yet exist or a decision nobody has formally made.
A phasing with multiple target states over multiple years naturally raises the question of who decides that a layer is complete and the next one may start. Is that determined by the management team alone, or does that decision lie with whoever has to make the target state operationally happen? That is exactly what you establish about decision rights in a change — without that agreement, every transition between phases gets stuck in a discussion that should actually have been held beforehand.
Before you start cutting an ambition into years, it is worthwhile to know whether the four layers are already sharp enough with you to actually phase; the free test "is your vision steerable" consists of six questions about exactly those four layers and shows within a few minutes where things still clash. Once the target state for the first year is established, the next step is the translation into capacity: which roles and tasks that target state requires, alongside what is available today in terms of people and hours. That difference between requested and available capacity is worked out in the work scan on ftetoai.com, and that bridge is what makes a phasing truly executable instead of just well argued.
Vertel wat u wilt bereiken, dan kijken we samen wat daarvoor moet staan.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.