FIELD NOTE #057 | Loyalty To The Plan Is Not The Same As Loyalty To The Goal

Engineering the Intelligent Enterprise · Oct 7, 2026 · 40m

Loyalty To The Plan Is Not The Same As Loyalty To The Goal

Plans are written to achieve goals. The plan and the goal occasionally diverge. Circumstances change. The goal moves. The plan does not always follow.

Some teams continue executing the plan long after the goal it was designed to achieve has changed — hitting every milestone, delivering every output, reporting green across every metric.

The execution is excellent. The destination is wrong.

This episode examines the mechanism behind Plan Loyalty — the continuation of a plan after the goal it was designed to achieve has changed, moved…