A Plan Comes Together
By Jim Shillenn
I love it when a plan comes together.” Those
immortal words bring images of Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith
of the A-Team, played by the late George Peppard, standing smugly with
a sly smirk and a cigar jutting jauntily out of his mouth.
We all wish we could savor our ability to plan just as Hannibal did.
But that was fiction and in the real world there is often little time
to plan. And even when you do disciplined planning, the world changes
and things can get complicated. You often find yourself faced with
tossing out the plan and running solely on primitive instincts and
simply just guessing what to do next to get you through the day. There
are days when the plan never does seem to “come together.”
So the question becomes – Should you bother to plan at all?
And if you do plan, what kind of planning should you do? How much planning
is enough?
Although not common, there are successful firms who have no formal
planning systems.
Nucor, for example, has no strategic plan, no written objectives
and no mission statement. Nucor’s success has been attributed
to a consistency in action at all levels of the organization versus
a formal plan. However, most organizations and professional business
advisors believe that planning is an important contributor to the success
of a business with both long-term and short-term planning, which are
critical planning elements.
For most organizations planning functions primarily as an enabler
for change. It is based on the assumption that, eventually, all things
change. Business environments destabilize, niches disappear, new opportunities
evolve and organizational leaders change. Strategic planning attempts
to anticipate these events in a way that the business can adapt to
change rather than face the chaos that could occur by being blindsided
from not taking the time to formulate a long-term plan.
Scenario planning is another approach to long-term planning. Scenario
planning accepts the fact that it is impossible to know precisely how
the future will play out. Given this reality, a good strategy or plan
to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures.
But planning for the future is no guarantee that the future scenario
you worked so hard to support with lots of good data will actually
occur. In fact, the chances that things will evolve just the way you
predicted are pretty unlikely. So why even go there? The primary value
of long-term planning is to provide context for change and the acknowledgement
that any business must be constantly vigilant to survive. It provides
organizations with an opportunity to challenge the status quo and,
if done well, can provide a venue for innovation and change.
Operational planning is a little more down to earth. It provides
a road map for how to get things done and when and how “routine” but
important decisions will be made in the short term. The challenge of
an operating plan is to provide enough detail for the players in an
organization to know what to do, but not so much detail that the organization
loses its ability to quickly adapt to smaller changes in processes
and the business environment.
Many organizations have managed to adopt some level of strategic
planning and most organizations have some level of operational planning.
However, a much overlooked planning process is succession planning,
especially in family owned businesses. Ironically, this is often one
of the most predictable planning events and is one that is often avoided
or just plain ignored. The cover story article on page 6 provides readers
with some very practical advice on how to get a succession plan in
place.
Planning is an important component to the success of most firms.
Every company is different with different products, different markets,
different cultures and different people. There are no magic answers
or recipes for the right way to do planning in your organization. What’s
important is to take some time to plan, know its value and its limitations,
and learn from it.
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