Strategy to impact

Strategy-to-impact is the loop that connects the work on a canvas to the metrics it's meant to move, and lets you trace whether it worked.

The link

A strategy card — a Work/Action or an Ideas/Hypothesis — carries an impact contract that links it to metrics in three roles:

        ┌──────────────────────────────┐
        │  Action / Hypothesis          │
        │  (carries an impact contract) │
        └───────────────┬──────────────┘
              target │ leading │ guardrail
                     ▼         ▼         ▼
                 Metric     Metric     Metric
             (main move)  (early)   (must not worsen)

• Target — the metric the work primarily intends to move.
• Leading — an earlier indicator you expect to move first, so you're not waiting on the lagging outcome to know if you're on track.
• Guardrail — a metric that must not degrade; it keeps a win honest.

A metric reference can point at a tracked metric (catalogued, shared) or a card on the canvas.

Where it surfaces: impact badges

On a dashboard, each metric widget shows impact badges — a compact count and status of the strategy items linked to that metric. The overlay lists each item's title, owner, expected change, measurement window, and current status, and links to its impact trace. A review can then answer: what bets are on this metric, and are they working?

The impact trace

The trace is the path from a bet to its result: the contract's expectation, the metric's actual movement across the measurement window, and the final status (won / lost / inconclusive). Tracing is how a claim becomes evidence.

Next steps