Whack the Mole!
Plan the Work and Whack the Mole!
“I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
I am flummoxed at how businesses large and small do planning. I have seen everything from fire, fire, fire to the most rigorous matrixed multi-faceted linked excel workbooks with circles and arrows.
So, what constitutes a good planning process and what constitutes a good plan? Could someone please tell me?
We all know that credenza-ware isn’t what planning is all about – you know, those nice notebooks with the stenciling and the custom tabs that contain a wealth of information and that sit proudly on your bookshelf… probably done by an outside consulting firm hired by the CEO and paid incredibly huge sums of money to take your hard work and reformat it into their proprietary templates and then take credit for the content. But I digress.
Or there’s whack-a-mole planning – - you know, chase all kinds of priorities around as fast as you can and hope to catch one or two. And everything’s a priority in whack-a-plan. You just have to whack whatever pops up. Don’t argue. Whack it! Fast! This is incredibly unsatisfying, because what it says is there isn’t a plan at all. Just a bunch of activities. Activity-based planning. Where activities substitute for objectives or strategies or results. Or whatever.
There are a few relevant lessons that I have picked up along the way… maybe these will make sense.
First, clearly answer the question, ‘what problem are we trying to solve?’ I read somewhere that the average doctor takes 17 seconds to diagnose a patient’s problem. The average marketer takes far less time. The best plan arises almost naturally and effortlessly from the proper diagnosis. Framing the problem is the most valuable step, and it’s the one most often glossed over. That’s because it’s human nature to want to problem-solve, not problem-frame. You don’t hear, “Bob got to be CEO because he could sure state the problem really succinctly” now do you? No, it’s more like, “Susan got to be CEO because she flat out got things done, drove solutions, waded in and rolled up her sleeves and fixed it.”
But you have to know what to fix. Sir Frank Lowe of the famous Lowe Advertising Agency used to say, ‘big answers deserve big problems’ and he was right. Frame it big. Another great Eisenhower quote goes like this – “if a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.”
Second, and as importantly in the diagnosis, define the boundaries. What things are fixed and what are variable? What can and cannot be changed? Oh, you say, everything is on the table and we shouldn’t constrain ourselves with limited scope. Look under every rock. Really? This is never the case and we all know it – there are always a few sacred cows, a few pet beliefs, a few cherished facts that cannot be changed. So, ok, just get them out and work with them or around them. I would much prefer to think inside a well-defined box than think outside an amorphous box. The clearer the picture of reality, the more creatively realistic the solution can be. No constraints means unrealistic output.
Said another way, what’s the business’ appetite? Massive change or incremental? Top down or bottom up? Lots of little stuff first? Pay as you go? Inclusive or exclusive? Urgent or studied? Every company has a ‘way’ that things get done. Know the boundaries and the shortcuts.
Third, what needs to change to solve the problem? Not what activities to do or what org chart to design or what budget to allocate. What needs to change! (You know the famous Sam Walton quote, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten”) The problem is “x” and the answers are “y” and “z”.
So, there now – - you have the problem clearly stated, the boundaries defined, and the answers objectively crafted.
Now you can do your plan. How to implement the answers within the boundaries to solve the problem!
Make sense? What does the plan look like? How do you really get down to stating the problem most powerfully? Can outsiders figure out the business boundaries or is that the work of insiders? Who do you get to help figure out the solutions? how do you pick the right solutions? Buehler?