Managing Goals in Your Story

Somewhere while researching more writing tips, I found the topic of goals.
Not writing goals in general such as words per day, but goals for your story.

The tip was to ask the question, What is the goal here? I know this follows along the lines of 'what's the point?', but this delves deeper into the mechanics.

When we first look at our stories, we might think it's pretty easy to pick a goal. I'll use an example from a story I'm working on. The story has two main goals, one being the plot; their boss is kidnapped and they need to find him, and two, characterization. I want to show teamwork between some of the characters.

That's just the big goal though.

The goal question works even better when you apply it to scenes. What goal do the characters want in this scene? I had a scene where Jason and Keyop were trapped/surrounded by the enemy.
The goal in this scene is to escape.
Pretty obvious. But I first thought the goal was to acquire a weapon.
It's not. Getting a weapon is what they need to accomplish their goal.
We can break that down into:
Goal = escape
Accomplish = get weapon

That's as simple as it gets. By finding out the answer to 'what is the goal?' and 'what is needed to accomplish the goal?', you can troubleshoot a lot of scenes.

If you use another familiar system, who, what, why, where, when, how, you might break that into this:
What = escape
How = get weapon

That leaves a lot of questions left though. If I wanted to expand it, I'd ask who or where they would get a weapon from.

There's no 'where' to get a weapon, so I go to, who. Another writer might ask where, or even 'what' kind of weapon is needed, but who works this time.
They get what they need from an enemy who approaches too closely.

Who can be multiple, and so can all the other words. In this case, I answer 'who' with Jason and the enemy, as in, 'who' is involved.
The question of how gets used again as well. How do they escape, and how do they get what they need. They need a weapon and they fight to get it.

But I wanted to show characterization as well. Doing that is a little more complicated than just asking 'how'.

I'm going to use 'where', and ask, where in the scene can there be characterization. Dialogue of course, that's a given.

Maybe some action.
Using action I have a couple ways to show character.
I choose to have Jason fight the enemy to get the weapon.
He could just reach out and do a 'knockout' and boom, scene over. But this time I'm not interested in showing what kind of fighting style he has. The general story goal is to show teamwork.
Because the scene is already set with some tricky landscape, I use that to make it harder for Jason to accomplish what he wants. And by doing that, I can bring in his teammate to help. He probably didn't even need the help, but it is appreciated, and the other character wanted to help, and that helps set the characterization, their personalities, through character interaction.

I've now accomplished all the goals for one scene. Obviously, you don't need to do this for every scene. The big 'main idea' is easy, it's the little bits that get writers stuck. You can try it on something you've already written to see how the formula works, or dive in and try it on your next scene. Just keep in mind that whatever you write, it should eventually lead up to accomplishing the complete story goal.

Quick Troubleshooter
who: who is involved in this scene? who can be brought into the scene?
what: what do they want? what do they need?
where: where are they? where can they get what they need?
when: when do they need to do it? when can they get it?
why: why is this needed in the scene? characterization, pacing, description, plot?
how: asking the above questions will decide how you're going to do it.