The agenda item had been on the planning commission docket for three months. The staff report was thorough. The metrics were tracked. The goal—a specific percentage improvement in permit processing time—had been set the prior spring by the city council and folded into the department’s performance plan.

But what nobody had asked, at any point in that process, was the question that belonged at the beginning: What does a well-functioning permit process actually look like for the residents and businesses depending on it? And how would we know if we got there?

The goal was not unreasonable. But it had been chosen before that question was ever asked, and that backward sequence can be the most common and quietly costly pattern in local government planning.

Getting the Sequence Backwards

Most planning cycles open with the goal. What number are we aiming for? What did we hit last year, and what’s a stretch from there? These questions feel useful. They move things forward, fill the column on the form, give the meeting somewhere to go. But they are not the first questions.

Before any goal is set, three others need answers. What is the specific yes-or-no question that would tell us whether we are succeeding? What metric answers that question directly? And only then: What threshold separates yes from no, demonstrating success?

When those questions are skipped, the metric gets chosen to fit the goal rather than to answer anything real. You end up with a measurement system that confirms whether a number was hit. It cannot tell you whether the people depending on the service are better off, and departments, over time, learn to chase the number rather than the outcome behind it.

A goal without a success question is a target without a direction. You can hit it and still not know whether you’ve gone anywhere that matters.

Why the Cycle Keeps Running This Way

The budget window opens. Department heads are asked for goals and metrics. The deadline is a few weeks out. There is a staffing gap to manage, a councilmember who has questions, a public hearing that ran past midnight. Goal-setting matters, but it is not on fire, so it gets dealt with near the end—a working session, an afternoon, sometimes a conversation in the hallway.

In those hours, you work with what you have. You pull last year’s numbers, set a directional target, and move on. The harder question—What does genuine success look like for the people receiving this service?—takes focused, unhurried thinking that most weeks simply do not allow.

Public accountability makes this harder still. In local government, goals are not just internal benchmarks. They go to council, to the community, to the chamber of commerce and other watchful constituents. That visibility pushes toward goals that are achievable, trackable, likely to show movement. A goal grounded in an honest success question might surface a metric that is genuinely hard to shift, an outcome that could take years to see—and that may be the very work that needs to be done. But years of difficult progress do not make for a clean council presentation. So, goals get chosen that can be achieved and reported. The appearance of progress gets managed. The harder question of whether anything actually improved gets quietly set aside.

The accountability structure meant to drive better performance can work quietly against the honest goal-setting that would actually produce it.

What Happens Without an Anchor

Without a written success question, there is nothing to hold the measurement system in place. When a metric stalls, it sometimes gets redefined. When a goal looks out of reach mid-year, it gets walked back toward what was actually achieved. No one is acting in bad faith. The original intent simply was never documented, because the question behind the goal was never written down. It was never asked.

Over a few cycles, the planning process quietly decouples from the decisions it was meant to support. Staff produce numbers. Leadership reviews them. The results are reported out. But the question underneath all of it—Are we delivering this service the way our community deserves?—goes unasked, because the metrics were not built to carry it.

In most cities, public works performance data will tell you what was completed. They will not tell you whether it was enough, whether it came in time, or how it landed for the people on the other end. That gap does not close with more data or a better dashboard. It closes by asking a different question before the goal gets set.

A Different Starting Point

The Question–Metric–Goal framework does not ask local governments to rebuild their planning processes. It asks for a different first question. Define what success looks like—specifically, in yes-or-no terms—before choosing how to measure it. Build the metric to answer that question. Set the goal as the point at which the answer becomes yes.

That reordering changes the conversation in a practical way. Rather than opening with a number, you open with something harder: What does success look like for the people we serve, and how would we recognize it? A goal that starts there is harder to quietly walk back when progress stalls—the original intent is on the table, visible to everyone in the room.

Part Two works through the framework step by step, using a scenario any manager will recognize. But the framework is only useful once the problem it solves is clearly in view. Goals get set every year. Metrics get tracked. Reports go out on schedule. From the outside, it looks like accountability. The question that would give it meaning just never got asked.

You cannot measure your way to an outcome you have not defined. The sequence is not a formality. It is the work.