Planning

The 7 Ps

You may have heard the old saying, proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance or some similar variant of the “7 Ps”. Well, here’s my take on how to make sure you are prepared to handle anything using 7 “P” words.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail”. All planning falls into two basic categories, simple and complex. But, regardless of how simple or complex the plan needs to be, all good plans consist of the same core components. These components, in their simplest form, are the “who, what, where, when, how, and how much”, needed to satisfy all requirements and achieve the outcome, commonly referred to as the objective. If you want to dive deeper into the planning process, check out our posts on Immediate Action Plans and the Planning Process.

Perspective

During the development of the plan, it’s crucial to understand why the objective is important and who it’s important to? Often the plan will form part of a larger strategy. In the military, we give consideration to what’s known as the “Commanders Intent 1Up and 2Up”. This allows you to develop your plan with the wider organisational context in mind rather than in a vacuum as is so often the case.

When drafting the plan, you must possess the requisite foresight to ensure the plan starts with the end in mind and the objective is central and remains the primary focus. There is an old saying, “the surgery was a great success, but the patient died”. Not understanding the wider context that connects the plan to the bigger picture may mean the objective of the plan is achieved, but the execution and delivery don’t align with the organisation’s values or ethical standards, or it may negatively impact broader organisational objectives. Understanding the Commander’s Intent means you can remain flexible and manoeuvre and change the plan to meet strategic objectives.

Performance

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. What’s meant by this is that the process of researching, developing, testing, and executing the plan is where the value lays. The plan itself is like a map and is something to follow and keeps you on track for the objective, but the dogmatic execution of the plan itself is not the objective of the plan. The desired outcome is the objective. The measure of the success of the plan is never how Ridgely you were able to stick to the plan, but rather how successfully you were able to achieve the desired outcome. If the planning process was done properly, the two should align, but to quote the famous philosopher Iron Mike Tyson “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. The execution of the plan, sustainment of momentum, and focus on the objective are the key aspects that need to be monitored and controlled.

Persuasion

Plans are written for people. Good plans contain all the information needed to achieve the objective and are written in a way that is easy to understand. These plans are simple in their format, logical in their structure, and consistent in their content. The aim of any plan is to enable those executing it to have no doubt about the activities needed to achieve the desired outcome. But this is only half of what makes a good plan!

All plans need to be approved by someone in your organisation who understands the outcome needed but has probably not been involved in the planning process. Your plan needs to clearly demonstrate and communicate its strengths to this person ultimately responsible for signing it off.

Patience

Most plans are too ambitious and those responsible for drafting them almost always underestimate how long they will take to write and how long they will take to execute. Executing the wrong plan, or a poorly developed plan will result in the corresponding outcome. Not all plans need the same depth of planning, nor will you always have the luxury of all the time you need to fully research and develop every aspect of the plan. Having a planning process for the development of simple and complex plans is the best way to mitigate the risk of being caught in the ‘planning fog of war’.

A robust planning process will allow you to focus your effort on developing the content of the plan rather than on how to draft it. Having a planning process is effectively having a plan for how to develop a plan and will save you an enormous amount of time when you are given the responsibility to develop a plan at short notice. Having the knowledge that planning and the execution of the plan will take a lot longer than thought, it’s important that you don’t rush into solution mode. You need to spend the time needed to understand the situation, develop courses of action, analyse courses of action, and make a decision on the best way forward before drafting the plan.

Persistence

The best plans are those that are simple to understand and easy to execute. But even a bad plan can be made to work if the objective is clear and is led by a leader who has the drive and determination to see it through to the end. No plan, no matter how well researched and drafted, will be effective without a dedicated and effective leader in charge. A key planning consideration is flexibility, and a good leader will be able to modify the plan on the fly whilst maintaining focus on the objective.

Poise

The execution of a plan needs to be such that everyone involved has confidence in the plan and the leader’s ability to make it work. The leader needs to be intimately familiar with the plan and must be able to anticipate issues and constantly adjust the plan to achieve the outcome. An often-made statement is to “make a plan and stick to it”. Whilst this is somewhat apt, a better statement is “make the right plan and stick to it”. The role of the leader is to execute the right plan and in doing so it’s the leader’s responsibility to confidently inform all those involved of any changes needed to keep the plan on track. The leader must use critical thinking and logic to drive his decisions and must not allow emotion to cloud his judgment. The leader must believe in the plan and demonstrate an unwavering resolve to achieve the desired outcome. This belief in the plan will be contagious and coupled with the leader’s energy will create a sense of team spirit and momentum.

Planning Process

If you’ve spent time working in middle or upper management in any business, you would have participated in, or possibly led a planning session. I’m also going to bet, most of you have been involved in a planning session where it was crystal clear that the person in charge had absolutely no idea what they were doing and everything seemed made up then and there!

I hear this complaint so often I’m sharing the technique I use, and teach, for how to facilitate a planning session. I’m not talking about the simple, ad hoc ‘who, what, where, when, how, and how much’, planning sessions, although they are also problematic so follow the link to my article on developing Immediate Action Plans. I’m talking about detailed and often complex planning, necessary to effect change, implement a new initiative, or solve a “Wicked Problem“.

Whether the planning needed is very simple or extremely complex you need a process to follow; otherwise, you really don’t know what you are doing! Imagine if you had a simple, repeatable, scalable process to guide you through your planning session anytime you need to be “that person in charge”.

You’d be surprised how many organisations don’t have structured planning processes in place. Some organisations use processes such as the Observe, Orientate, Decide , Act Loop, ( OODA-loop), Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), or even Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA).

Being a former member of the Australian Army, I’ve been trained in the use of the Military Appreciation Process (MAP), and in the years since leaving the military, I have used an adaptation of the MAP to help structure my planning. I have also taught this process to clients to help them add structure to their planning sessions.

I have included my version of the MAP based planning process in this article as a model you can use to guide you through your future planning session. This planning model is deliberately basic on the surface to make it easy to interpret and allow you to start using it straight away. With a little training, you can dive into the detail, unpack its power and use it to guide you through the development of very complex plans to address even the most difficult problems.

To employ the model, start in the centre, work your way out, and then work clockwise from blue to red, to orange, and finally green. Like most processes, this model is iterative, so when you get to the end, you may choose to continue to use the model to further refine your plans over time.

“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Immediate Action Plans

In our article on the Planning Process, we provided a planning model based on the Military Appreciation Process (MAP). The MAP is a powerful tool that can help leaders develop detailed and complex plans to address new initiatives or solve “Wicked Problems“.

There will be times though when the time needed to properly research and develop a detailed plan is just not available. Your staff or those you work for will expect you to be able to quickly develop a plan of action to address an impending need. You need a systematic, simple, and effective way to quickly develop a robust plan and you need to be able to quickly brief your staff and executives in an effective, professional, and convincing manner.

This article provides a process for developing effective, consistent Immediate Action Plans (IAP) and is based on the military’s Situation, Mission, Execution, Admin & Logistics, and Command & Signals (Communication) or SMEAC for short.

SMEAC can be used in two main ways. It can be used to develop plans that are tested and rehearsed and kept at the ready to be implemented when a certain condition or set of conditions reveal themselves. It can also be used with great effect by leaders who need to quickly formulate a plan and be able to brief that plan up or down the chain of command.

Unpacking S.M.E.A.C.

Situation: Determine the issue or problem that needs to be solved. Gather assumptions. Determine any freedoms of action or constraints. Identify Why the plan needs to be developed and executed.

Mission: This is a mission statement that is written following the format; Who, What, Where, How, and by When. A military mission statement does not include the Why, however, it is important to explain the Why as part of the Situation brief.

Execution: This is where you develop the detail about how the plan will be implemented. In the military, the execution is often rehearsed.

Admin & Logistics: Identify, document, and brief your personnel on any administrative and logistic factors needed to support the execution of the plan.

Command & Communication: Understand the commanders intent 1Up & 2Up. Establish the ‘Chain of Command’ and assign authority. Determine and define who the stakeholders are, what information they need to be provided, who needs to provide it, and in what format, how frequently it needs to be provided, and over what means.

This simple process is used by junior and senior commanders to plan and execute military missions and can be adapted to help new and experienced business leaders by providing a quick, deliberate, robust, repeatable, and memorable method for developing Immediate Action Plans.