Five signs your planning is going well

Tigers have outstanding plans

Here are five signs that show if your organisation or division’s planning is going well:

1) The CEO picks up the whiteboard marker

The reason they were chosen for the job is because they were deemed to have the capability to create, communicate then deliver a future by focusing the efforts of hundreds or thousands of people.  While they need input from all the minds around the table, the final plan is theirs, and theirs alone, and this starts from articulating their initial thoughts.

2) The word ‘develop’ is not seen 

The purpose of a planning day isn’t to agree to develop a plan, it’s to actually come up with a plan.  So if you have ‘develop a strategy for the Table Tennis Division‘ as an outcome, you’re not there yet.  Go back into that room until you have something like ‘Table Tennis Division exists to round out parlour games offer,  break-even performance all that is required.‘

3) No Divisional PowerPoint presentations

That is, managers going through a presentation of their division’s plan.  What this misses is that the purpose of the day is vigorous debate about what the whole organisation should be doing so the CEO can make a call.  If you must, have each manager do a short presentation on what they think the organisation should be doing and why.  Now debate!

4) It gets loud

Everyone sees stuff differently, so the managers in the room at the planning day will not agree.   If the team has put in the effort to get to know and learn to trust each other, this will be a healthy situation where vigorous, rollicking argument tests every idea.  End result – a CEO that gets to make much sharper and stronger final decisions which will gain support because everyone was heard.

5) No catch-alls

This means things like a list of values or strategic priorities where everyone gets a look in.   I have recently seen the values  ‘Creativity, Responsibility, Achievement, Respect’.  Very nice.  But not useful if I have to apply them to make a decision during the year.  A powerful act is to choose just one value so it can be used for line-ball decisions that come up during the year.  This is part of how culture is created along with a sense of purpose that moves the whole show forward.

So now it’s over to you – how is your planning going?