Perfect plan

I love it when a plan comes together.

But here’s the problem: How often is your perfect plan disrupted by reality? It seems that surprises always come up, whether good or bad.

Your job as the leader is to help your team navigate through that mess in real time.

So what’s the point of creating the perfect plan if you never actually follow it fully? It would seem that maybe the plan is pointless.

There’s a little truth to that, honestly, but it misses the point. The true purpose of the plan is to focus your thinking, think through possibilities, and align the team.

Focus: To create a plan, you have to decide exactly what problem you’re trying to solve. You define what the desired result is.

Possibilities: The perfect plan consists of choices. First, you decide on which process you’re going to use to get to the desired result. You decide who’s going to do what and in what order. You consider opportunities and challenges which are likely to happen along the way, and what preparations you need to make to accommodate them.

Align: Now you’re able to pull team around the plan. But more than just who’s doing what when, the point is that everyone gets behind the purpose and goal. Now they want to put their energy behind making it happen. They have confidence that they, as a team, can pull it off.

So what about reality throwing you a curveball? Your job is to figure out how to tweak the plan to still hit the purpose and goal with a slightly different plan to get there. Then you pull the team around this change, reinforcing that it’s still important to successfully reach the goal.

So the perfect plan isn’t the one which is followed perfectly. It’s the one which helps you get to the right endpoint despite how circumstances change.