Cascade exists for the purpose of making an organization’s strategy more visible to everyone. Despite being transparent by default, we understand that some goals may need to be hidden from other users for a variety of reasons.

Turning Private Goals "On"

To be able to mark goals as private, go to Admin > System > Settings and turn on the "Allow private Goals" setting. Note that you need System Permission to access this screen:

With this setting turned on, any user can mark any goals they own/co-own as "Restricted" (private). The "Restrict Visibility" checkbox can be found in the Define Details section when building a goal...

...and can be toggled between "Yes" and "No" for goals that have already been built:

If you only want certain types of goals to be able to be marked private/restricted, such as KPIs, you can remove the "Restrict Visibility" checkbox from those Goal Templates (see here for more). This checkbox is technically one of many Custom Fields that can be added/removed from Templates.

Who can see Private Goals?

Some Roles and permissions still let people see goals in reports, searches, dashboards, etc. even when they are marked as private.

These are:

Goal Owner’s Manager: The goal owner’s direct manager, and other direct managers upward from there.
Co-owners’ Direct Manager: If the goal has any co-owners, the co-owners' direct managers can see the goal, too. However, those managers' uplines do not have the same visibility as the main owner's manager's upline. This is meant to help keep views cleaner for non-direct management lines.
Owners/Co-owners of Parent Goals: The Owner and Co-owners of any Goals to which the private goal contributes (directly or indirectly) can see the goal. This is because the higher-level goal owner assumes visibility over the entire body of work aligned to their goal.
Task Owner on the Goal: If someone owns a task on a goal, but not the goal itself, he/she and his/her manager can still see the goal for proper context.
Strategy Permission Users: Anyone with the Strategy Permission will be able to see all private goals (Strategy Permission grants full access to all strategic plan data, regardless of plan or ownership).

Example Scenario

I’m Florence Leclaire and I have a private Goal which has Ping Simo’s Goal as a parent. The goal is private because it's performance related and deals with sensitive information. The Goal is highlighted in orange below, and can be seen/searched by:

Any user with the “Strategy” Permission
Myself (Florence Leclaire)
My Manager (although not in the picture, she can see my goal), and also her manager(s), if she has one.
Ping Simo, because my goal is aligned to (contributes to) his Goal.