The Vasa Museum in Stockholm houses one of the world’s great archaeological treasures. It also happens to hold one of history’s most compelling cautionary tales for organizational leaders—one that’s been on my mind lately. But we’ll come back to that.
At ArchPoint, we specialize in guiding clients through the strategic planning process. And while there are many models available, our preferred methodology for strategic planning is the OGSM Framework (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures). This is because OGSM offers a few distinct benefits. First, by linking high-level objectives all the way through to specific measures, it provides a direct line-of-sight from strategic direction to execution. Secondly, because it fits on a single page, it forces clarity and focus. And finally, its ability to cascade from the executive level through departments and individual teams makes it well-suited to facilitating alignment for organizations of varying complexity.
It’s this ability to cascade through organizations I want to focus on here, and it’s what brings us back to Stockholm and The Vasa Museum.
The Vasa
In the 1620s, Sweden was locked in war with Poland and Lithuania, and King Gustavus Adolphus aimed to rule the Baltic Sea. So he commissioned the Vasa, a massive warship, to project his military might. Plans were drawn up, a master ship-builder was assigned, and construction began.
However, during construction, King Adolphus personally ordered changes to the ship’s design, including a second gun deck and additional heavy cannons. While the shipbuilders tried to adapt to these changes, there was little they could do without starting over, and no one wanted to derail the king’s vision. The completed ship’s center of gravity was too high, and what resulted was one of history’s great nautical embarrassments. After travelling just 1,300 meters from the port on its maiden voyage, the Vasa listed in the breeze, took on water, and sank as thousands of people watched from shore. The ship rested on the sea floor until it was salvaged in the 1960’s and ultimately placed in The Vasa Museum.
Shipbuilding in the 17th century was a complex process involving scores of builders and craftspeople. It required careful planning and sophisticated coordination across several disciplines. In other words, it was the perfect forum for a well-designed, thoughtfully-cascaded OGSM—something the Vasa sorely lacked.
Strategic planning certainly hasn’t gotten any simpler over the last 400 years. And while the consequence of a poorly aligned strategy may no longer be disaster-at-sea, the story of the Vasa reminds us how important it can be to fully align our strategy vertically, starting at the executive level.
Strategy & Structure
The tragedy of the Vasa wasn’t a lack of vision, ambition, or technical skill. The King had a clear objective, and his shipbuilders were among the finest in Europe. The ship capsized because a major strategic change was declared without re-aligning the organization that existed underneath it. The skilled builders attempted to literally bolt new demands onto an existing hull, resulting in a top-heavy structure that couldn’t withstand real-world pressures.
Across modern organizations, a version of this dynamic plays out every day. Leaders formulate a bold new strategy to capitalize on shifts in the market or other opportunities.
We share the vision and expect the organization to respond.
Yet, even when leaders work to disseminate a new direction effectively, the roll-out either fails to effectively take into account the on-going work committed to the existing strategy; or it gets reduced to vague slogans—rarely offering our teams clear, traceable lines of sight to the work required to deliver the new strategy.
When we don’t put in the work to design properly-cascaded strategies that keep our entire organizations’ efforts vertically aligned, the resulting vacuum is filled in other ways: teams end up grafting new executive priorities onto existing habits; they continue working toward old incentives; they pull in opposing directions; and they invent initiatives that sound productive but do little to advance the overarching business goals. The result is often an organization that appears to be operating normally but remains fundamentally unstable beneath the surface.
Visibility & Impact
Well-designed cascaded OGSMs help to prevent this kind of strategic instability. Ultimately, we should be able to look at the plans of any department, product, or category and answer “yes” to these critical questions:
- Can I trace the cascaded plan and priorities back to the Corporate OGSM? Answering “yes” protects against strategic drift—where well-intentioned teams gradually drift away from executive priorities to solve local, departmental problems. Without clear lineage, teams instinctively create their own priorities based on what feels urgent to them. Traceability acts as an operational filter that protects resources and bandwidth by steering us away from siloed initiatives and back toward our primary goals.
- If we successfully deliver our cascaded plan, will it tangibly move the needle on a Corporate OGSM goal? Answering “yes” allows us to validate the cause-and-effect relationship between local execution and global results before work begins. The potential gap between activity and outcomes can be a dangerous one for a poorly-cascaded strategy, with teams achieving their individual benchmarks while the overarching strategy stagnates.
The lesson of the Vasa isn’t that leaders shouldn’t set bold, transformational goals. What the Swedish King demonstrated is that strategic changes—in order to stand any chance of success—demand intentional, structural alignment throughout the organization. By insisting on the clear lineages and traceable impacts made possible by a successfully-cascaded OGSM, we can provide our teams with clarity of purpose and a strategy built to weather any storm.
Ready to build a strategy that holds up under pressure? To learn more about implementing fully-aligned strategic plans across your organization, download our full Cascaded OGSM Framework document here.
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