Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill every board, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Fieldnote quarterly kickoff. Sales, support and the 3 builders each carry a different mental list of what is coming. Karim runs a 60 minute radar to put the four horizons on one target.
What the team took away
The tablet rollout moved from Now to This year once sales saw the support load behind it. Two items nobody could place went Off the radar on purpose, which ended a recurring argument in standup.
How to run it
Preparation
Name the rings before the session and make the first one narrow: "Now" should mean the next two weeks, not "soon". A vague ring absorbs everything.
Cap the centre out loud: the innermost ring holds five items, no more. The constraint is the whole method; without it the target becomes a list.
Draw the sectors from where the work actually comes, not from the org chart. Product, Customers, Tech, Team works; Squad A, Squad B does not.
Ask each participant to bring their own items on stickies, written before the session. What people write alone differs from what they dare say in the room.
Agenda
15 min
Everything on the table Each person puts their stickies in their sector, anywhere in the ring they think fits. No discussion yet, only placing.
10 min
Read the target You read it out loud, sector by sector, without commenting. The group discovers how crowded the centre already is.
20 min
Enforce the centre The centre is over its cap. Every item that stays has to push another one out, out loud, with a reason. This is the part that produces the decision.
10 min
The outer ring Go through what sits on the edge and ask, for each, whether it should leave the radar entirely. Saying no now is cheaper than saying it in three months.
5 min
Owners and revisit Everything in the centre gets a name, and you set the date you will redraw the target. A radar nobody redraws is a snapshot, not a tool.
Pitfalls
Without a cap on the centre the exercise produces a pretty picture and no trade-off. The cap is not a detail, it is the method.
Do not let people place their own item and defend it in the same breath. Place everything first, argue second, or the loudest voice sets the centre.
Sectors copied from the org chart turn the target into a territory map, and each team pushes its own items toward the middle.
"Off the radar" that never gets used means nothing was decided. If the outer ring is empty at the end, run the centre pass again.
Afterwards
The centre becomes the input of Now / Next / Later or of a roadmap. Set a date to redraw the target, otherwise it ages in a week.