VMOST Analysis
VMOST checks that the tactics on the ground actually trace back to the vision at the top, through five narrowing layers: Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics.
Layers narrow as they descend through five bands, wide at the top and pinched by the time tactics land at the bottom.
Reach for this when…
- Teams are busy and producing a lot of activity, but you can't trace it back to strategy.
- A new tactic gets proposed and nobody can say which objective it serves.
- You're auditing a plan someone else wrote and want to know if it actually hangs together.
How to run it
- State the Vision: the long-term destination, in one sentence.
- State the Mission: why the organisation exists and for whom.
- Set Objectives: specific, measurable targets that would prove progress.
- Set Strategies: the high-level approaches chosen to hit those objectives.
- List Tactics: the concrete actions, owners and dates that deliver each strategy.
- Walk the chain both ways, tactic to vision and back, and cut anything that doesn't connect.
A worked example
Situation. Julien Fabre ran a freight logistics firm in Lyon, France, whose ops team had a long list of 'initiatives' nobody could connect to the company's stated growth plan.
Applied. He ran VMOST top to bottom and found the Objectives layer missing entirely: tactics jumped straight from a vague mission to a spreadsheet of forty projects.
Result. He killed twenty-six projects that traced to no objective and kept the fourteen that did. The ops team finished the quarter with a plan people could actually explain in one sentence.
The catch
VMOST is only as honest as its weakest link - teams often reverse-engineer a plausible objective to justify a tactic they already wanted to run. It says nothing about whether the vision itself is any good. And the five layers can become a paperwork exercise done once a year and then ignored.
If you can trace every tactic up to a strategy but not one strategy down to a specific tactic completed last month, the chain is decorative.
Origin: Rakesh Sondhi