Adding a status to a goal allows individuals and teams to prioritize and organize goals, but also fosters accountability and transparency, ensuring that efforts remain aligned with intended outcomes. By clearly defining the current status—whether it's "To Do," "In Progress," "On Hold," "Done" or "Won't Do"—it becomes easier to assess where efforts stand and identify any potential delays or challenges.
Enabling statuses on objective types and actions is an Admin function that can be applied through Admin > Strategy model > Objective > toggle Enable status. Visit How to Use Types to Structure Your Strategy for more details on the Strategy model.
A status is a manual change applied to an action or an objective type. Not to be confused with health - which is automatically calculated by Cascade depending on the success criteria and targets established (see What does each Health mean in Cascade? ).
Once the respective objective type or action is clicked, you can adjust the status in the side bar. Alternatively, status can be adjusted in the Kanban board from the Home Page.
It's important to note that the statuses "To Do," "In Progress," and "On Hold," can be thought of as contextual and these statuses do not affect the health or the progress of the objective type or action. If a status is "Done" or "Won't do", it will affect the progress/health of the objective type and action.
Changing the Status to Done
Marking an objective type or action as "Done" will keep the progress the same, but override the health of that objective type or action to "On Track". As a result, the parent objective's progress will calculate the same however the parent objective's health may be affected.For example: Prior to any status changes, the objective is at 78% progress with 'Behind' health. This is determined by taking an average of its success criteria, 2 actions and 1 measure (60%+75%+100% / 3= 78%)
Taking a look a the second action "Develop and offer courses on emerging technologies", it is showing 75% progress and 'At Risk' as this was a 2024 action that did not get completed during that timeframe. 
Once the status has been changed to "Done", notice how this action's health changed from "At Risk" to "On Track" - with progress remaining the same. As a result, the parent objective changed from "Behind" to "On Track" as there is no longer an action at risk.
Note: there was no change in progress %.
The same logic will apply for nested objectives that are marked "Done", in which the progress remains the same but its health will change to "On Track" subsequently, the health of the parent objective it sits under may change.
Changing the Status to Won't Do
Marking an objective type or action as "Won't Do" will omit that goal entirely, so that its health and its progress do not contribute to the parent objective. As a result, the parent objective's health and progress will be affected as it will not include that goal at all.
Taking a look at the same example above, if we change the same action to "Won't Do" - notice how the entire action gets greyed out. The parent objective is no longer considering this action, in which its new progress is 80% (taking the average of 60%+100%/2 =80%) and it's now "On Track" as the remaining 2 success criteria are solely determining progress and health.
To note: the action still remains in the plan but its progress and health do not affect any goals.
The same logic will apply for nested objectives that are marked "Won't Do", in which the progress nor its health will impact the progress and health of the parent objective it sits under.
FAQ
Can I report on a status?
Yes - When creating a table, you can add the 'status' as a column field to display the status for the respective action or objective type or you can filter by status to only show specific statuses.
Can I apply a status on a measure?
No - you can only apply a status on an action or an objective at this time