Goal drift: how to make sure yesterday’s goals don’t drive today’s decisions

Business works the same way. By the time a goal makes it from a planning session into real workflows, the context has already shifted.

The result is goal drift: the subtle misalignment that happens when goals, metrics and decisions stop staying synchronised with your business’ day-to-day reality.

It happens when your business keeps executing with yesterday’s definition of success, even while today’s reality offers better information.

We think goals aren’t static, but rather should reflect the daily ‘flow’ (nodding to Heraclitus) of your business. That is, they should be changeable.

We do this by embedding goals into your business’ infrastructure. Goals in Decidr are not an endpoint, they’re a primary organising force that evolves and calibrates as your business does.

Mind the drift, we’re not boiling frogs

In AI, “goal drift” refers to how, over time, a system can start behaving in ways that subtly diverge from its original objective. It’s the “boiled frog” syndrome, hard to spot because the shift is gradual.

The outputs look plausible, the system still appears productive, and the deviation only shows up when you zoom out and ask what the behaviour is actually optimising for.

The business version looks similar. Your teams and tools keep executing, dashboards keep moving, and yet the work is focused on an older interpretation of success.

Decidr reduces this risk by making goals measurable through goal metrics, and actionable through decision systems that can be updated as your business’ reality changes.

Goal drift is subtle misalignment between three things that should stay in sync:

• The goal: the outcome your business is trying to make true
• The metric: the signal you trust to tell you if you’re getting closer
• The decisions: what the business chooses to do next, day after day

When these three stay synchronised, execution compounds. When they drift apart, you still get activity, and you often get good activity, yet the business starts feeling harder to steer than it should.

The Decidr lens works here because it treats drift as a normal by-product of learning. It gives you practical ways to notice it early and correct it without drama.

How drift shows up in your business

Drift rarely announces itself. It shows up as little mismatches that keep repeating.

You might notice:

• Dashboards that look healthy, while the business feels stuck
• Priorities that make sense in one team, yet feel strange in another
• Metrics that get hit, without the outcome improving
• Customer value drifting away from what you’re optimising for
• Apps producing “correct” recommendations that don’t feel relevant anymore

These aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs the business has moved on, and your goal system hasn’t fully caught up.

How Decidr keeps goals on track

For us, goals are structured objects connected to beliefs, constraints, metrics and workflows. That’s what keeps intent usable when the business is moving quickly.

Goals in Decidr sit inside your system as part of its working structure, connected to the signals and constraints that shape real decisions.

As reality changes, your goal changes with it, and your business keeps steering towards a current definition of what matters — that is, your goal.

So a useful way to talk about goal drift is to talk about the scoreboard.

Goal metrics: where intention becomes steerable

A goal metric in Decidr is a measurable indicator used to track progress toward a goal. It translates intention into something quantifiable and actionable.

This is where goals become practical.

If a goal is the outcome you’re trying to make true, a goal metric is how the business checks whether it’s getting closer.

It creates a shared way to evaluate decisions, and it gives teams a common language for trade-offs.

When you have the right metric, you don’t need endless debate about whether something is “working”. You can point to the signal.

Goal metrics are used to evaluate the performance of your workflows, agentic apps and decisions. Metrics give agentic apps a way to understand what success looks like and adjust their behaviour dynamically as conditions change.

Your systems aren’t guessing. They’re reasoning against a measurable definition of progress.

That’s why goal metrics help prevent drift. When goals are living parts of the system, the metrics attached to are the feedback mechanism that keeps intent current.

What goal metrics look like

Goal metrics show up as values you already recognise:

• Revenue targets
• Churn reduction goals
• Workflow completion time
• Inventory accuracy

These are simple, familiar numbers. The power comes from what they connect to.

When a goal metric is linked to the workflows that influence it, and the decisions that shape those workflows, your business gets a clear line of sight from intention to action. The goal stops being a statement you revisit at planning time and becomes something the business can steer with week by week.

In short, goal metrics turn ambition into measurable progress your apps can pursue intelligently.

Why this matters for your business

Clear metrics help you track what matters, improve performance and align your team and apps around outcomes, not activity.

They also protect you from a very common business trap: staying busy on the wrong path to improvement.

When a metric is well chosen and linked to a goal, it’s much harder for your business to confuse motion with progress. This gives decisions a clear reference point.

And when the metric itself stops behaving the way you expect, that’s useful information too. It’s a sign your business has learned something. The goal may stay, but the path gets sharper.

A goal metric gets you a trustworthy signal.

The next step is making sure that signal sits in the full context of how your business operates: the beliefs you’re acting on, the constraints you’re choosing to respect, and the workflows where work actually happens.

That’s what we’ll cover next.

Next in this series: The Goal Stack, a practical method for goals that actually execute