Strategy Is Simple
Here in Australia, we have two major winter codes: Australian Rules football (played throughout Australia) and rugby league (which is really played only in New South Wales and Queensland). Rugby league may be played elsewhere, but its heart and soul sit firmly in those two states.
The absolute pinnacle of rugby league each year is the State of Origin.
It’s a best-of-three series. New South Wales vs Queensland. The best players. And without question, the biggest rivalry in Australian professional sport.
Now, I have a client based in northern Queensland, roughly a 7–8 hours drive from Brisbane, where one of these games is held each year. Every game is a sell-out, and for rugby league fans, it simply doesn’t get bigger than this.
My clients are absolute rugby league tragics. This is their Super Bowl.
The business itself manufactures fibreglass tubing for the mining industry — used to deliver oxygen down into mines and extract carbon dioxide.
When we worked on their BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), we deliberately anchored it to something they genuinely cared about.
So the BHAG became this: Produce enough pipe to literally “pipe our way” to Game 1 of State of Origin in Brisbane.
To make it real, measurable, and fun, they added a physical scoreboard: Each month, they literally move a truck down the road by the distance equivalent to the amount of tubing they’ve manufactured — a visible marker of progress toward State of Origin.
Then the owner added the magic ingredient. He said, “When we hit it, I’m taking the whole team. We’re all going to Brisbane for State of Origin — 48 hours together.”
Here’s the part I loved most.
The team doesn’t want to wait.
Our quarterly planning sessions have shifted from:
“Did we hit the numbers?”
to:
“How much faster did we move the BHAG this quarter?”
“What can we do this quarter to accelerate it even more?”
We spent the next hour focused purely on that question and coming up with action items to move faster or should I say improve, sales and efficiency
It’s such a powerful example of what happens when you gamify a BHAG and tie it to a shared, emotional reward. Strategy turns into momentum, planning turns into action, and the whole company starts pulling in the same direction. Creating a simple Strategy
