A goal is concrete, measurable and has a deadline: 15% revenue growth in Q3, two new branches this year. An ambition is the desired future that explains why those goals exist and which goals will come after them.
If you are grappling with this question today, chances are that goals have been set in your organization without anyone ever voicing the ambition behind them out loud. You only notice this once two departments both hit their goal and the organization as a whole does not move forward with it.
A goal is a statement about a result: number of customers, revenue, lead time, margin. It can be checked off. An ambition is a statement about a position: which organization you want to be over three to five years, for whom, and why that is worth pursuing.
At a company of 50 to 300 employees, you often see that each department has perfectly fine goals, but that no one has derived them from a single shared ambition. Sales has a revenue goal, operations has an efficiency goal, HR has a turnover goal. All three achievable, all three thought up independently of each other. Without an ambition as the overarching layer, the problem arises that is described in what to do when departmental goals work against each other: goals that are technically achieved but leave the organization working against itself.
A goal ends the moment the figure has been achieved. An ambition continues to exist and constantly requires translation into the next layer: which target state belongs to it, which goals follow from that, and which capabilities are needed for it.
A manufacturing company with 120 employees, for example, might have the ambition to be the most flexible supplier in the region within four years. That is not a goal, it cannot be measured in a single figure. But it does translate into goals: shorter delivery times, a broader assortment, faster changeover of the production line. Without that translation step, the ambition remains a sentence on a strategy document that nobody recognizes in their day-to-day work.
Goals can be set top-down and handed out per department. That works, up to a certain level. An ambition only works if the organization recognizes it as something it wants to contribute to itself, and that requires a different approach than a memo or a kick-off.
That is why, in practice, an ambition becomes most useful when the entire organization thinks along about what that ambition concretely means, not just management. How this can be done without months of meetings is worked out in how do you involve the shop floor in a strategy without endless consultation. An ambition that only lives in the boardroom quickly gets translated on the floor into "just carry on as usual, with a new goal added."
Growth and margin are the classic example of goals that can conflict with each other: more revenue often requires concessions on margin, and vice versa. Without an ambition, there is no way to determine which goal takes priority when they clash. With an ambition, there is a direction that already partly makes the trade-off: an ambition focused on market share accepts a different margin trade-off than an ambition focused on profitability per customer. How that trade-off is made concrete is described in how do you weigh growth against margin in a strategy.
With a goal, the question is simple: can this figure be achieved with the resources available? With an ambition, the question is more complicated, because an ambition touches multiple layers: is the vision on which the ambition is based still current, is the vision state concrete enough, is the target state derived from it, and are the goals that follow from that consistent with each other?
To see whether this is in order in your organization, the free test is your vision steerable, with six questions about the four layers, provides an initial picture, without the need for a consultation.
The distinction between a goal and an ambition only becomes practical once the ambition has been reduced to what the organization concretely needs to be able to do. That is the step in which an ambition is translated into the roles, tasks and skills that the target state requires, as described in which capabilities does my organization need for this ambition.
That capability back-translation is the bridge between ambition and execution: what the target state requires in terms of roles and tasks is laid alongside what already exists today. The difference between the two, expressed in hours, is shown in the werkscan on ftetoai.com.
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.