One Simple Trick for Better Planning

99% of orgs don't do this.

In a previous post, I started talking about Nailing the Quarterly Plan. The thing about planning is that it only makes up half the game. A fact that often goes unnoticed is that planning, in and of itself, is a necessary but insufficient condition to achieve your goals. To make planning effective, you need to always see how your plans fared against reality. If there's one lesson we can learn from Scrum, it is the habit of crafting a plan and then assessing how much of it was accomplished.

All of you must surely have heard of the 10,000 hour rule, where we learn that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to really get good at something. But it's not just repeating the exercises over and over again that does the trick. One needs to become aware of one's mistakes, one needs to reflect upon one's performance and one needs to consciously try and avoid making those same mistakes repeatedly. This is the thing that makes practice practice. Otherwise it is just timepass.

And it's the same with planning. The future is unknowable. Plans collapse upon first contact with reality. We have to adapt. Shit happens, we have to eat it. All of this happens in the fog of war. We arrive at the end of the quarter bloody and beleaguered and what do we do? We tear another page off the calendar and go blithely blundering along, with nary a thought to what transpired, what happened to our best laid plans.

This is a mistake. Want to know what to do instead? Read on below 👇