Is Your Planning Process Stuck?
To be successful as leaders, we need to ditch the slow, disconnected annual planning process that we’ve been accustomed to doing and opt for a process that is more relevant and adaptive to today's pace of business. Here are four red flags of a planning process that’s stuck in the old days –
A VAGUE VISION. No one has time for lack of clarity. A future state for your organization needs to be inspiring and aspirational, but also concrete and tangible. This makes it not just visible, but also easier to communicate and to compare your goals, objectives and progress against.
PLANNING IS BASED ON AN ANNUAL TIMELINE. The organizational climate shifts so quickly that annual planning is a thing of the past. Instead of falling victim to this old pattern, plan and refresh initiatives with targets in quarterly increments. We should still plan on having annual goals, but quarterly increments allow us to be more agile and thereby responsive to the sudden and dynamic changes in the environment.
RIGID TIMELINES. Timelines are arbitrary and inflexible. So many things an happen that derail our attachment to timelines – emergencies, political climate, world economics. Make sure to keep dates, but connect them with milestones or trigger events as these are objective, quantifiable, and agreed to in advance.
LAGGING INDICATORS. Great metrics keep you on strategy and provide a data-based way to make strategic decisions. They need to be the leading type of indicators that are reportable weekly rather than lagging which makes responding and correcting plans too late.
Shifting from these outdated practices to an agile approach enables your team to adapt, be forward-thinking, and proactive when it comes to its planning practices. Ultimately as a leader, when your long-term vision is connected to the day-to-day decisions, you get results.
