Running It with a Team

Shared goals, individual tactics

The load-bearing design decision at team scale is where accountability attaches. Goals and their lag measures belong to the team: '$120k in new bookings this quarter' is everyone's number. Tactics belong to individuals: each person's weekly recurring actions, written to the same Friday-test standard as chapter 4 prescribes, each provably serving a team goal.

This split preserves the property that makes the system work — every scored item has exactly one owner who fully controls it. 'The team will do 50 outreach touches weekly' diffuses into nobody's Tuesday; 'Priya does 10 daily, Marcus does 10 daily' survives contact with the calendar. Team execution scores are just the aggregate of individually-owned, individually-scored tactics.

The scoreboard

Teams add one artifact individuals don't have: a shared scoreboard showing each member's weekly execution score alongside the team's lag-measure trajectory. Its purpose is mutual visibility, not surveillance — execution becomes a shared fact rather than a private struggle, and research on public progress tracking consistently shows visible scoreboards lift engagement with the underlying behavior.

Two norms keep a scoreboard healthy. Scores are about plans, not people: a 68% triggers 'what should we change about your week?' — never a performance conversation; the moment scores feed appraisals, people start writing safe tactics and the numbers go soft. And the lag measure always sits beside the execution scores, so the team sees both halves of the loop: are we executing, and is the plan working?

The team WAM

The WAM format scales to teams with tight time discipline: 30 minutes, hard stop. Round-robin score reports first — number, biggest win, biggest blocker, next week's commitments, about two minutes per person. Then a short segment on the team lag measures. Anything needing discussion gets parked to a separate slot; the WAM's deliverable is witnessed commitments, at team scale as at every other scale.

The leader's job in the room is counterintuitive: report their own score first — including the bad ones. A leader who posts a 72% and names the fix makes honest scoring safe for everyone; a leader who skips their own report converts the WAM into status theater within three weeks.

• Cadence: same slot weekly, 30 minutes, attendance non-negotiable.
• Round-robin: score → win → blocker → commitments (≈2 min/person).
• Team view: lag measure trajectory and the week's aggregate score.
• Park everything else — strategy debates get their own meeting.

How this differs from OKRs

Teams often ask whether this is OKRs with new labels. It isn't, and the difference is exactly the lead/lag distinction from chapter 5. OKRs manage outcomes: objectives cascade down the org, key results are (mostly) lag measures, and review happens quarterly — OKRs specify where to land but stay silent about any given week. The 12-week system manages execution: weekly tactics are the instrumented unit, scores arrive every Friday, and the accountability loop runs 12 times per cycle instead of once.

In practice they compose well — OKRs to set organizational direction, 12-week execution to run the weeks that deliver it. The full comparison, including when each fits, is in 12-week planning vs OKRs.