Is your plan automatic or stick?
How you drive your ‘Crawl, Walk, Run' plans have an impact on your outcomes, and they can be driven differently.
The phased approach we take to implementing a plan can be powerful and impactful in achieving the results we want when done correctly. But how many times have we gotten stuck in a phase?
It feels good to put one in place, it’s the first step in taking action but it can also become a band-aid that's overused and provides no results or extremely delayed delivery. This is likely to happen if you drive your plan like an automatic car (put it in drive without much thought or engagement after the fact) versus a stick shift (where you are heavily engaged in driving)
Here is an example of an ‘automatic plan’: a team wanted to secure a strategy with a client, they knew that was their goal. The challenge was that they were not moving anything forward because the goal was too broad, new noise was disrupting them daily, making it hard from them to stay focused and iterate where needed, and they didn’t have a clear timeline of milestones they wanted to hit. So although they showed a lot of ‘work’ and intent, communicating that up the chain, they couldn’t make progress and soon they hit panic as time was being compressed in the year and they couldn’t show anything for it. They were blinded by good intentions and busy work when they should have went deeper (the devil is always in the details), to firm up what their goal meant (what does this actually look like), outline steps and people needed to accomplish and continuously ensure they were hitting the milestones and taking into account new information that could help or hinder it.
It happens all the time, good intentions with no results. And while you can’t control what you can’t control, this is about focusing on what you can control and the more you do that, it increases the likelihood you will move toward what you want to achieve.
How to tell if you have an ‘automatic’ plan?
1. Loose sight of the objective/don't have a clear one
2. Slow growth and movement
3. You aren’t actively engaging with your plan/people to see what can be
moved up, adjusted, or skipped to accelerate
4. You are in the comfort zone of a phase, dampening any lack of urgency or
motivation to progress
5. You miss your goal!
How to shift to a ‘stick shift’ plan?
1. Ensure you have the right objective in place that fuels your plan to get to
the end and keep it top of mind and action.
2. Clear timelines and accountability/people to meet each phase. Strive for
real dates vs listing a month/quarter if you can because accountability can
get lost in broad timelines.
3. Revisit the plan, often, to see what can be changed, and accelerated to get
to the goal.
4. You achieve/exceed!
You can see the difference in approach, “stick” is tight, focused yet agile, like an expert driver, you know where you need to go, how to adjust and are more prepared for all winding curves you need to manage.
Take these steps with your new goal, or existing goal, map it out and see if it helps you and your team drive better.
This way you are driving the plan and the plan isn’t driving you.
How do you drive your plan?
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