3-month, 6-month, 1-year, and 3-year planning

Not every goal belongs in the same conversation. Horizons sort your roadmap by time so a quick configuration fix and a multi-year program are planned at the altitude each deserves. Forest works across four: 3-month, 6-month, 1-year, and 3-year.

The horizons map roughly to the kind of work they hold:

• 3-month is for high-priority gaps you can close quickly. These are often single-step maturity moves on critical capabilities, the wins that lift your Org Score soonest.

• 6-month covers work that needs coordination across a team or a tool rollout, where the gap is real but the climb takes a quarter or two.

• 1-year holds structural goals, such as raising a whole domain from Defined toward Quantitative, where several capabilities advance together.

• 3-year is for ambitions that depend on process and culture maturing, like reaching Optimized on capabilities that require sustained measurement.

Use priority to decide what goes near. A capability with a large gap and criticality 3 belongs in the near horizons even if it is hard, because deferring it leaves your highest-weighted exposure open. A small gap on a nice-to-have can wait.

Horizons are not deadlines for everything at once. Loading the 3-month horizon with twenty goals guarantees most will slip, which drags execution discipline down. Commit to what a team can actually finish, then let later horizons carry the rest.

Once goals sit in the right horizons, assign them to people through execution lanes and check the cumulative effect in timeline and projections.