If you find yourself caught off guard, surprised by hurdles and challenges, or generally just wishing you could plan better. I have a few concepts that should help with your planning. I have observed, too many times, that myself or others get caught off-guard by hurdles, road blocks, or other negative surprises to the projects and long-term strategies that are being planned. This post should shed some light on how to work around these plans and what you can do to plan better and get ahead of some of these surprises. Keep reading to find more about some of the pitfalls you can avoid by planning better.
- Acknowledge your present reality
- Work like everything will go wrong
- Step-by-step and bit-by-bit
- Learn from the present, look to the future
Acknowledge Your Present Reality
In reading the book “good to great” by Jim Collins, one of the principles he talks about the most successful CEO’s and corporate leaders exhibit is the ability to acknowledge the present reality. To start with, this is a hard concept to live out. It is always hard to acknowledge your weaknesses, present circumstances, industry declines, failings, shortcomings, and deficiencies, but failing to do this could lead to disastrous outcomes. This may look like dwindling sales, negative customer/public perceptions, or disgruntled employees. In your personal life, it may look like spending more than you’re making, your possessions are falling apart, or a medical condition or limitation. Failing to acknowledge this will ultimately mean that the negative effects will take place and you will not be prepared for it. In an apt example, global factors could cause your industry to decline, you can either expect declines and start to prepare for what impact the global factors could have on your business or you can hope that it will just “blow over”. I’m sure that if you were to look at Blockbuster in 2000, they couldn’t see that one of their biggest competitors had already launched. They probably also couldn’t see their inevitable closure 10 years later. Thankfully we have the benefit of hindsight, but we need to learn from their lesson. To their credit, Blockbuster did launch an online streaming service, but it was too little too late. By the time they closed the online streaming market had taken hold and Blockbuster didn’t have enough market share to keep them afloat. In your specific case, your area of influence may not be as large as a company such as Blockbuster, but it is important for you to acknowledge the challenges facing your areas of responsibility or influence. Acknowledging your present reality is only part of the equation. Once you acknowledge your reality you have to look for how to make it better, and sometimes make some hard decisions.
Work like everything will go wrong
Assuming everything is going to go wrong is not an easy thing to do, but it is a lot easier than trying to do something about it. In the previous section, I talked about how you need to acknowledge the present reality. This is important as you can’t possibly know what is going to go wrong unless you acknowledge the reality you’re in. Also, it’s not enough to just say “everything” and leave it at that, you have to build a plan for it. This principle is the natural conclusion from the previous one in that you have to put a plan together as if everything is going to go wrong. You have to ask the question, “what would I do if ___ challenge were to arise” and then record that action and implement it in your mitigation strategy. Looking at the Blockbuster example, if you work as if a young start-up company was going to offer videos with really long loan times and the ability to deliver content without leaving one’s house what could/would you do to compete with that? Perhaps, make your catalogue available online with the ability to select the video you want and pick it up at a convenient location. Perhaps you could add-in “frequently watched together” and “recommended based on your previous viewings”. Although some of these things were implemented, it was too little too late. Acknowledging the present reality and working like everything will go wrong could have found the way to save the company before the streaming revolution had taken over. The other aspect of working like everything will go wrong is seeing what legitimate value-add you have that could mitigate the challenge that faces you. However, working like everything will go wrong is one way to ensure that you plan better for the future and ensure that your plans are more successful, in general.
Step-by-Step and Bit-by-Bit
The biggest challenge in thinking about what could go wrong fall in one of 2 categories. The optimist will typically fall into the category of, “I can’t think of anything that could go wrong.” The pessimist will fall into the category of general doom and gloom whereby they are afraid that everything will go wrong but can’t pinpoint any one thing. Both of these are not helpful for different reasons. This principle, however, works through each of the necessary steps and identifies pitfalls with each of them specifically. The best practice here is to identify as descriptively the possible pitfalls that could take place with each step. Once you’ve got the problems, then you can think of the solutions. Its difficult to flip back-and-forth between problems and solutions, so doing one phase at a time is better for most people. An example is if you were leading a project whereby you wanted to launch a new product. Working from the end to the beginning is sometimes easier, so start with the customer buying the product and ask what they need to do to purchase the product. Identify the challenges that could be faced in this step, some examples are website issues, delivery issues, finding the product in your assortment, awareness, or pricing. Identifying a “story” for each of these is a great way to flesh out the problem a customer could face, such as, “the customer is not able to find the new product because it is 3-menus deep on the website”. Once you’ve identified all the problems, you can start to work out solutions, in the example given a banner could be placed on the main page starting the day the product launches directing attention to the new product. As you work out solutions to each step you may find more problems (or flaws in your solution), keep working out the problems for each step. Once you’ve done this a few times you will have some “go-to” problems that you can recall that are known to be problematic and these steps become easier to work through.
Learn from the Present, Look to the Future
When you are on the other side of a plan, be sure to take the time to look back and prepare for “next time”. Continual improvement is something that I’m sure you’ve heard of, but it’s not always clear what it is or how to do it. The concept in continual improvement is that there is always something that can be improved, finding that thing and improving it is how you are continually improving. It also is predicated that you don’t have to get it perfect the first time, you can do so in the next round of improvements that will take place in the coming weeks (rather than years). This is also where the ideas from the previous section come in, you can learn from the common problems that come up and apply them to future situations. This was taught to me in the form of a “Post Mortem”, although the terminology is a little morbid, it is a really effective way of capturing continual improvement. When working through this exercise there are 3 buckets that different aspects of a project fall into: “what worked”, “what didn’t work”, and “ways to improve”. They are explained in this way, what worked is every action that was taken that if not taken would have prevented the project from going as smoothly as it did (for what that’s worth). These are the things to keep doing in future projects and never forget to do. The “what didn’t work” section is any action or aspect of the project that caused problems in the current project that don’t have a specific action that can be taken to fix it. The last bucket is “ways to improve”, this bucket is any action that should be taken next time that was realized too late. One example of this would be to change the communication plan to incorporate answers to questions that came up during the project to get ahead of these questions. The reason that this falls into the “ways to improve” section is that you can’t change the announcement after its sent and you can’t anticipate the questions that could come up if you’ve never done this before. The last piece is to take a moment to write down everything that went wrong from the current project that may relate to other projects as well. Ideally, store them in a place that’s easy to reference them when you’re working on finding problems in the various project steps.
These principles and practices should help your projects get better. These principles (when used effectively) should help long-term strategies as well so that when you’re planning (short and long term) you will see more success and better results. If you like what you’ve seen here, I would highly recommend reading some of my other work here:
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I trust that it will help you in your daily personal and professional life to improve your planning skills and help avoid some of the pitfalls that you may be currently experiencing.