Army Running Estimates and Peak OS: How Leaders Detect Execution Drift Before the Plan Misses

Most companies do not miss the quarter on the final day of the quarter.

The miss usually begins much earlier.

A product milestone slips.

A hiring plan falls behind.

Sales pipeline quality weakens.

Engineering discovers a dependency.

Manufacturing yield starts moving in the wrong direction.

A customer implementation takes longer than expected.

A cross-functional initiative remains technically "on track," but several of its underlying assumptions have changed.

Individually, none of these signals may appear catastrophic.

Together, they may be telling leadership that the organization is slowly separating from its plan.

By the time the financial results make the problem undeniable, the organization may have been drifting for months.

I think of this as Execution Drift: the growing distance between what the organization intended to accomplish and what is actually happening across the system.

This is what makes the U.S. Army concept of a running estimate so interesting when compared with Peak OS.

Army doctrine defines a running estimate as a continuous assessment of the current situation used to determine whether an operation is proceeding according to intent and whether planned future operations remain supportable. A 2024 Center for Army Lessons Learned publication goes further, arguing that running estimates should not merely present raw data. They should give leaders assessments, conclusions, recommendations, risks, and opportunities that help them make decisions.

That distinction maps closely to an organizational problem I have seen across hundreds of leadership teams:

Leaders rarely suffer from a complete absence of information. They suffer from an inability to continuously turn distributed information into a useful picture of where the organization actually stands.

A dashboard can show numbers.

A report can describe activity.

An operating picture has to do something more.

It has to help leaders understand:

Where are we relative to the plan?

What is changing?

What does it mean?

What could prevent us from reaching the intended outcome?

Where is an opportunity emerging?

What requires a decision now?

That is the deeper parallel between Army running estimates and Peak OS.

Peak does not use a military running estimate.

But the One-Year Plan, OKRs, KPIs, Weekly Camp, Triage, and recurring planning cadence create a similar organizational capability: a continuously refreshed understanding of execution relative to intent.

And that capability may be one of the most important components of Organizational Intelligence.

A Status Report Tells You What Happened. A Running Estimate Helps You Decide What Happens Next.

The Army's recent work on running estimates begins with a surprisingly familiar complaint.

Commanders leave meetings without the knowledge they need to make decisions.

The Center for Army Lessons Learned found that staffs frequently presented raw, unrefined data rather than analysis. The resulting information did not sufficiently help leaders understand the current situation, assess progress toward the desired end state, or make decisions about future action.

That sounds like many executive-team meetings.

Sales reports pipeline.

Engineering reports development progress.

Finance reports cash.

Marketing reports leads.

Product reports roadmap status.

People reports hiring.

Customer Success reports churn.

Everyone has provided information.

But has leadership learned anything?

That is a different question.

Imagine an executive team hearing:

Pipeline is $18 million.

Engineering is 80% complete.

There are eight open leadership roles.

Runway is 17 months.

Customer churn is 6%.

Those are data points.

They become decision-useful only when placed into organizational context.

Is $18 million of pipeline sufficient to achieve the revenue plan?

Is the quality of that pipeline improving or deteriorating?

Does 80% engineering completion mean the release is On-Course?

Is the remaining 20% the easiest portion of the work or the hardest?

Are the eight open roles connected to major objectives?

Does 17 months of runway support the organization's current hiring and product plan?

Is 6% churn inside the expected range, and if not, what is driving the variance?

The Army's 2024 running-estimate guidance makes this distinction explicitly. It warns that data points detached from current and future operations are not enough. The most useful running estimates move toward assessments, conclusions, and recommendations that help leaders make decisions.

The same should be true inside a company.

Reporting tells leadership what the numbers are. Organizational Intelligence helps leadership understand what the numbers mean.

Leaders Need an Operating Picture, Not Every Detail

This connects to something I wrote about in Peak Teams.

A CEO needs to understand what is happening across the organization.

But the CEO cannot personally operate every detail.

The requirement is visibility, not execution of the details. Teams need to own their work while leadership retains enough understanding to know whether things are on track and where attention is required.

This is an important distinction because many CEOs compensate for weak organizational visibility by getting closer to the work.

They join another meeting.

They ask for another report.

They start looking directly inside project-management software.

They ask functional leaders for more frequent updates.

They create a new dashboard.

They start attending Product meetings.

Then Engineering meetings.

Then pipeline reviews.

The CEO gets more information.

But the organization has not necessarily developed more intelligence.

It may simply have increased the amount of data one person has to process.

The stronger answer is an operating system that continually turns execution into a common picture.

In Peak, that picture starts with the plan.

The Three-Year Vision establishes where the organization is heading.

The One-Year Plan creates a nearer definition of success.

The OKRs identify important capabilities and outcomes that need to be achieved during the current execution period.

The KPIs indicate how important parts of the business are performing.

Then Weekly Camp repeatedly brings those elements back into view.

The team is not starting from:

"What happened this week?"

It is starting from:

"Given what we said mattered, where do we stand now?"

That is a fundamentally different leadership conversation.

The One-Year Plan Creates the Reference Point

A running estimate only has value relative to something.

You cannot determine whether an organization is drifting if nobody has agreed where it is supposed to go.

Army running estimates continuously compare current conditions with the intended end state. The recent Army guidance emphasizes that the estimate should tie the current state to the planned end state and continually assess progress between them.

That is exactly why the One-Year Plan is so important in Peak.

The One-Year Plan is not simply a list of goals.

It establishes the organization's agreed definition of success at the end of the planning horizon.

In Peak Teams, the One-Year Plan is described as a clearer, nearer map of where the organization intends to be and what needs to become true by the end of the year. The purpose is to give leaders and teams a reference point they can return to rather than forcing the CEO to continually remind everyone where the organization is heading.

Now the organization can ask:

Are we still moving toward this picture?

Which parts are progressing?

Which assumptions have changed?

What capabilities have we built?

Which objectives are beginning to drift?

Does the current resource model still support the plan?

Has the external environment changed enough that the plan itself needs to be reconsidered?

Without the intended state, metrics become isolated numbers.

With the intended state, they become evidence.

KPIs Help the Organization Understand Its Current State

This is one of the places where KPIs become much more valuable than simple scorekeeping.

In Peak Teams, I describe KPIs as a way of measuring the business to learn the business. As teams consistently track metrics, they develop a deeper understanding of what drives performance, improve their ability to predict outcomes, and learn which signals actually matter.

That is very close to the function of a running estimate.

A useful KPI does not simply answer:

"What number did we get?"

It should eventually help answer:

"What does this tell us about the condition of the organization?"

Consider a frontier-tech company.

Manufacturing yield drops from 96% to 93%.

Maybe that is noise.

Or perhaps it is the first visible indication of a component-quality issue.

That issue may increase rework.

Rework may change manufacturing capacity.

Capacity may affect a program milestone.

The milestone may affect customer acceptance.

Customer acceptance may affect revenue timing.

Revenue timing may affect runway.

One KPI can therefore become a signal inside a much larger organizational picture.

The leader who only sees 93% sees a metric.

The organization that understands the connected consequences has intelligence.

That is why KPIs need context.

OKRs Reveal Whether the Organization Is Building What the Plan Requires

KPIs and OKRs answer different questions.

KPIs help establish where the business stands.

OKRs help establish whether the organization is accomplishing the work and building the capabilities necessary to move the plan forward.

That distinction becomes extremely important for detecting Execution Drift.

Suppose revenue is currently On-Course.

That sounds positive.

But the OKR to establish a new enterprise sales capability is Off-Course.

The current KPI may look healthy because existing customers or earlier pipeline are carrying performance.

The capability required to support next year's revenue plan may be falling behind.

If leadership only looks at the KPI, it may conclude:

Everything is fine.

If leadership sees the KPI in combination with the OKR and One-Year Plan, it may conclude:

Current performance is fine, but future execution capacity is weakening.

That is a much more useful operating picture.

Army running-estimate guidance similarly insists that leaders consider both current conditions and future supportability rather than developing a myopic focus on what is happening right now. The Center for Army Lessons Learned specifically argues that a useful estimate should anticipate future requirements and continuously assess whether the organization can reach the intended end state.

A company needs the same ability.

Current performance and future readiness are not the same thing.

Execution Drift Often Appears Before the Financial Miss

Boards and CEOs frequently focus on lagging results because those results are clear.

Revenue missed.

Gross margin deteriorated.

Cash declined faster than expected.

The launch slipped.

Customer churn increased.

But those outcomes usually have causes that appeared earlier.

Execution Drift can begin in several forms.

A cross-functional dependency remains unresolved.

A key role remains open.

An OKR stays Off-Course for multiple weeks.

A KPI begins deteriorating.

A product milestone moves.

A customer assumption changes.

An important decision repeatedly returns to Triage without resolution.

A team consistently lacks confidence in its forecast.

A functional plan becomes disconnected from the One-Year Plan.

A leadership team continues changing priorities without changing the plan.

The organization may still report acceptable headline results.

But its operating position is deteriorating.

This is why visibility into execution is so valuable.

Peak Teams makes the point that regular milestones allow teams to recognize when they are moving Off-Course early enough to respond rather than discovering the problem at the destination.

The objective is not to predict every future miss.

It is to increase the distance between when the signal becomes available and when the consequence becomes unavoidable.

That distance creates options.

Weak Signals Are Valuable Because They Preserve Options

This may be one of the most important implications for mission-critical and frontier-tech companies.

Late information is often expensive information.

Suppose a software team discovers a problem today.

Perhaps it can deploy a fix tomorrow.

Now consider a hardware program.

A small engineering assumption influences component selection.

The component affects procurement.

Procurement affects manufacturing.

Manufacturing affects testing.

Testing affects certification.

Certification affects customer delivery.

The original signal may have appeared months before the ultimate consequence.

The later the organization recognizes the issue, the fewer options remain.

The Army's running-estimate framework is built around keeping current, relevant information connected to conclusions, risks, opportunities, and recommendations so leaders can make decisions while options still exist.

That is a useful way to think about Organizational Intelligence in companies:

The value of organizational visibility is not knowing everything. It is knowing important things early enough to still do something about them.

Weekly Camp is valuable partly because it reduces the time between signal and shared awareness.

Triage reduces the time between awareness and decision.

That is how operating rhythm can increase decision velocity.

Weekly Camp Is Where the Operating Picture Gets Refreshed

The Weekly Camp is one of Peak's central mechanisms for maintaining shared visibility.

The team reviews OKRs.

Owners identify whether they are On-Course, Off-Course, Done, or being intentionally pushed.

The team reviews KPIs.

Those are identified as On-Course or Off-Course.

Off-Course items move to Triage.

This creates an efficient distinction.

The organization does not need to discuss everything.

It needs to see everything that matters and discuss the exceptions that require collective attention.

That is remarkably consistent with the Army's critique of poorly designed running estimates.

The 2024 guidance argues that staffs should not default to briefing all of the raw information used to produce their analysis. They should lead with conclusions and recommendations while remaining capable of showing the underlying data when leaders need to understand the reasoning.

In a company, the equivalent is not:

"Show me every task."

It is:

Is this outcome On-Course or Off-Course?

If On-Course, keep moving.

If Off-Course:

What do we need to understand?

That preserves leadership attention for the parts of the operating picture where judgment has the greatest value.

An Operating Picture Should Generate Decisions

This may be the most important test.

A leadership dashboard that never influences a decision is probably not an operating picture.

It is reporting.

Army running-estimate guidance repeatedly emphasizes that the purpose of the estimate is to support decisions. The 2024 publication says clear conclusions and recommendations should drive planning and execution, while collecting large amounts of information without that connection serves little purpose.

Peak's Triage creates the corresponding decision layer.

An Off-Course KPI is not simply marked red.

An Off-Course OKR is not simply noted.

The issue can move to Triage.

The team then uses ACT:

Assess the situation.

What is actually happening?

Consider alternatives.

What are the viable responses?

Take action.

What are we going to do, who owns it, and when?

The operating picture therefore creates a flow:

Signal → Understanding → Decision → Action

Without the final two steps, visibility creates awareness but not execution.

The Best Information Is Decision-Relevant Information

Companies have become extremely good at producing dashboards.

Modern software makes data collection almost effortless.

That has created another problem:

What should leadership actually pay attention to?

The Army's recent running-estimate guidance suggests starting with what the commander needs to know to make decisions rather than starting with everything the staff can measure. It specifically criticizes formats that encourage teams to focus on data instead of assessment and recommendations.

That is useful for a business leader.

Do we need 54 KPIs?

Probably not.

Do we need every function's entire project-management system inside the leadership meeting?

No.

Do we need every possible operational update?

No.

The better question is:

What information helps this leadership team understand whether the organization's plan remains achievable and where intervention may be required?

That question should shape the operating picture.

A CEO may need to understand:

revenue trajectory,

runway,

product milestones,

major hiring capacity,

customer health,

manufacturing performance,

major company OKRs,

cross-functional dependencies,

and significant risks or opportunities.

The functional teams beneath leadership may track dozens of more detailed metrics.

That information matters.

It simply does not all belong at the same level.

This is why team-of-teams organizations need nested visibility.

Organizational Intelligence Has to Move Up From Specialized Teams

A leadership team's operating picture is assembled from knowledge distributed throughout the organization.

Engineering knows Engineering.

Sales knows Sales.

Manufacturing knows Manufacturing.

Finance knows Finance.

Program Management knows Program Management.

No one function possesses the complete picture.

The Army running-estimate model similarly relies on specialized staff areas continuously assessing the situation within their areas of expertise and turning that information into conclusions and recommendations that can contribute to a broader understanding.

The business parallel is strong.

Functional teams need their own detailed operating picture.

Then relevant information moves upward.

But what moves upward should not simply be raw data.

It should increasingly answer:

What are you seeing?

Are you On-Course?

What changed?

What does it affect?

What risk or opportunity does it create?

Do you need a decision?

Who else needs to know?

That is how a team-of-teams becomes more intelligent without requiring every team to know every detail about every other team.

Organizational Visibility Must Also Move Across

Some of the most important information should not only move upward.

It needs to move across the organization.

An Engineering issue may matter to Product.

A Product decision may matter to Sales.

A Sales commitment may matter to Manufacturing.

A Finance constraint may matter to People.

A hiring delay may matter to the program plan.

This is why a strong operating picture is not simply a CEO visibility tool.

It creates shared visibility.

In Peak Teams, alignment is connected directly to visibility: people can understand their own work and see how the work of teammates and other teams fits into the broader picture. That increased visibility makes issues and opportunities easier to recognize earlier.

That is Organizational Intelligence at the team-of-teams level.

The CEO can see the whole more clearly.

But so can everyone else who needs context to make a good local decision.

The Operating Picture Cannot Depend Entirely on the Meeting

This is one of the most interesting lessons from the Army's recent running-estimate work.

A running estimate should remain current even when a scheduled meeting is not happening.

The 2024 guidance argues that running estimates need to be continuously updated, accessible across the staff, and useful for decisions independently of the meeting schedule. It explicitly criticizes systems where information only becomes current once or twice per day in preparation for a meeting.

That has a direct lesson for companies.

The Weekly Camp should not be the first time anyone updates an OKR.

It should not be the first time anyone discovers the KPI missed.

It should not be where everyone spends the first 30 minutes reconstructing reality.

The operating rhythm works best when the underlying information is already current enough for the meeting to focus on understanding and decisions.

That is part of the role of a shared dashboard and explicit ownership.

The owner of an outcome maintains the status.

The team arrives able to see the picture.

Weekly Camp then asks:

What does it mean?

This improves both speed and meeting quality.

An Operating Picture Should Look Forward, Not Only Backward

Traditional reporting is retrospective.

What happened last month?

What happened last quarter?

What was revenue?

How many deals closed?

How many releases shipped?

Those questions matter.

But leadership is responsible for the future.

The Army's running-estimate concept specifically combines understanding of the current situation with judgments about whether planned future actions remain supportable. The 2024 CALL guidance emphasizes anticipating future requirements rather than maintaining a narrow focus on current operations.

A company operating picture should do the same.

Suppose the company is currently hitting its revenue target.

But:

pipeline creation is declining,

two Sales hires are delayed,

a new product capability is Off-Course,

and Customer Success capacity is nearly full.

The historical report says:

We are winning.

The operating picture says:

There is a growing probability that future performance will deteriorate unless something changes.

That is why Organizational Intelligence is different from financial reporting.

Financial statements tell leaders what the business has produced.

Organizational Intelligence helps leaders reason about what the organization is becoming capable—or incapable—of producing next.

A Running Estimate Should Also Identify Opportunity

This is another part of the concept that is easy to miss.

Running estimates are not simply early-warning systems for problems.

Army guidance emphasizes identifying risks and opportunities. Accurate and timely estimates can help leaders see opportunities worth exploiting, not only problems that need to be mitigated.

The same should be true inside a company.

A KPI unexpectedly improves.

Why?

A customer segment begins converting at twice the normal rate.

Why?

A new manufacturing process performs better than expected.

Could it be expanded?

A Product experiment creates unexpected adoption.

Should the roadmap change?

A recruiting source suddenly produces exceptional candidates.

Can it become a repeatable channel?

An operating picture should help the team notice where reality is better than the plan too.

Organizational Intelligence is not simply:

Where are we failing?

It is:

What is reality teaching us that should influence what we do next?

The Board Needs an Appropriate View of the Same Reality

This also has implications for governance.

Boards do not need every operational detail.

But boards should not operate from a completely different reality than management.

A useful board-level operating picture can create shared understanding around:

Where is the company relative to the One-Year Plan?

Which major business metrics are On-Course or Off-Course?

Which organizational capabilities are progressing?

What significant execution risks are emerging?

Where is the management team making adjustments?

Where may the board's experience or network help?

In Peak Teams, the value of clear planning and measurable performance extends to investors and boards because it creates a more tangible picture of direction and progress.

The board should not become the Triage meeting.

But it benefits from management having a coherent operating picture.

That makes governance conversations more useful because the discussion can move beyond retrospective explanation toward execution understanding.

Frontier-Tech Companies Need a Particularly Strong Operating Picture

Running estimates may resonate especially strongly with frontier-tech leaders because their execution environments contain so many interacting variables.

Consider a defense company delivering a complex system.

Engineering says the core architecture is On-Course.

Manufacturing reports lower yield.

Supply Chain identifies a long-lead component constraint.

Program Management sees a delivery milestone at risk.

Finance knows a delay would move a major payment.

Business Development is discussing an expanded follow-on program with the customer.

People is still recruiting the engineer needed for a critical subsystem.

Each fact matters.

None provides the complete picture.

Organizational Intelligence appears when the organization connects them.

Manufacturing yield is not simply a Manufacturing KPI.

It may be a program risk.

A cash-flow risk.

A customer risk.

A hiring issue.

And perhaps a strategic opportunity if solving it creates a scalable manufacturing capability the company did not previously possess.

The organization needs to understand the system.

That is the value of maintaining a running operating picture.

Peak Creates a Business Version of Continuous Organizational Assessment

Peak does not use Army running estimates, and the two systems should not be treated as equivalents.

The Army framework was developed for military planning and operations.

Peak OS emerged from more than two decades of working with hundreds of growth-company teams.

But the parallel is meaningful.

Army running estimates continuously assess the current situation against intent and future requirements, with an emphasis on turning raw information into analysis that helps leaders make decisions.

Peak creates a business execution architecture with similar underlying logic:

The One-Year Plan establishes intent.

OKRs show the capabilities and outcomes being pursued.

KPIs provide operating signals.

Weekly Camp continually refreshes shared visibility.

Off-Course status reveals meaningful variance.

Triage turns variance into decisions.

Quarterly or Semiannual review determines whether the plan itself needs adjustment.

The tools are different.

The operating principle is familiar.

The Goal Is Not More Reporting. It Is Better Organizational Understanding.

Across hundreds of companies, I have seen leaders ask for more information when what they actually needed was more understanding.

More reports.

More dashboards.

More meetings.

More metrics.

More updates.

Eventually there is so much information that important signals disappear inside the reporting system designed to surface them.

The Army's recent running-estimate work makes a useful point: if information does not ultimately contribute to conclusions and recommendations that help leadership understand progress toward the desired state, the organization may simply be tracking large amounts of data with little decision value.

That is an excellent test for any company's operating system.

Does this information help us understand where we are?

Does it tell us something about where we are going?

Does it expose a meaningful change?

Does it reveal a risk?

Does it reveal an opportunity?

Does someone need to decide something?

If not, perhaps the leadership team does not need it.

This is where Organizational Intelligence becomes practical.

It is not an abstract idea about having a smarter company.

It is the organization's ability to continuously convert distributed signals into shared understanding that improves decisions and execution.

The Best Time to Detect a Miss Is Before It Becomes One

A company with weak visibility often experiences execution like this:

The result misses.

Leadership asks why.

Teams reconstruct what happened.

Dependencies become visible.

Earlier signals are discovered.

Everyone realizes the problem had been developing for months.

Then the organization promises to watch it more closely next time.

A stronger system reverses the sequence.

The signal appears.

The organization sees it.

The team understands what it may mean.

The issue reaches the right decision forum.

Action occurs.

The operating picture updates.

Execution continues.

That is the real value of detecting Execution Drift.

It does not guarantee that every plan will succeed.

It guarantees something more realistic:

The organization has a much better chance of knowing when reality is separating from intent while there is still time to respond.

For military and former-military leaders, the concept of the running estimate provides familiar language for that capability.

For growth companies, Peak OS provides a business operating rhythm through which it can happen.

And for frontier-tech organizations where execution is distributed across highly specialized, interdependent teams, maintaining that shared operating picture may become one of the most consequential organizational capabilities they can build.

Related Insights

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