Planning / The Eleven Essential Questions

First, the questions need to be put into the right language for the organization so that there are no short cuts with regard to substance. These questions can be applied to any formal organization – large company, start up, government – but you might need to change some words to fit the context.

Second, I would form a three-person team against each question; with one of these people being designated the leader. The leader MUST be content heavy, not hierarchically heavy. If need be, you can address hierachy with the other two team members. But, we must have content strength on the teams, people who have the inside knowledge with respect to the questions. You need to put the person at the head who actually knows how customers feel? Who knows if we are meeting our delivery promises? Who knows if we have really brought anything new to the market? People with titles, who are drawn from that area of the company, which is supposed to be responsible, will simply and instinctively try to get everything to point to “yes”. After all, isn’t this what they have been doing for years? In every day life, all leaders, from the CEO down, are trying to rationalize their trade-offs. This behavior continues in daily management. But, the fundamental mission of a planning exercise, conducted at a certain point in time, is to get to the truth and after that you can figure out what you are going to do about it. OK so far?

Now, there are eleven questions. I am asking for three persons per question. You may want to hear from thirty-three people in the organization and, if that is the case, populate the teams with thirty-three people. However, I sort of doubt that this will be your conclusion. It is more likely that you have perhaps fifteen people who you trust, maybe twenty, and you will need to populate the groups with only these people. In some cases, an individual will be a leader. In others, he will be a team member. But, most people will be assigned to more than one group.

The most important point is that you must not allow this to become an “exercise”, as if you were conducting a workshop. This must be viewed as action oriented and results oriented and people must know that serious business decisions are going to be made on the basis of this work.

Third, I want to address two more subjects. One is the strong leader principle and the other is collaboration.

In business people spend an inordinate amount of our time sitting around and discussing nonsense. There is no other word that works. Why? Many reasons: people are not informed and are covering for themselves. People don’t want to say what they feel or believe because they are afraid of the consequences. CEO’s restrict input because they know that if everyone said what they felt, and if many of these thoughts and feelings were “sloppy”, it could be very disruptive. Another reason is that people can be lazy in their thinking. People can simply like to hear themselves talk. Most people are not decisive and don’t want to get to the bottom line. Finally, oral communication is usually transactional and linear, as opposed to being “systems talk” and is therefore not a perfect medium.

The unfortunate truth is that it isn’t worthwhile to listen to everyone because many people are just very lazy in their thinking. This is an important point because it simply is not only the CEO’s fault that input is restricted. In fact, very few people in business really get the business model and tend to look at business as if it were single threaded. This is, of course, wrong. CEOs must combine the cost picture, with the revenue picture, with a pragmatic assessment of the possible, with an appreciation for how people behave… and somehow combine it into business wisdom. All effective CEOs do this.

Thus, exercises like this can be turned into committees that meander forever. Frequently, committees will disregard most important points because the members can’t arrive at 100% certainty. We cannot let this happen.

Here is my belief. We’ll take the strong leaders over collaboration, but we will find a way to share critical questions and answers with those from whom we need full buy-in. First, our team leaders are capable of delivering on most of the high level answers. This is why they were picked. They know the truth. They can quickly get to yes or no, and they can defend their positions. Second, in most cases, the leaders know what needs to be done. When this is not true, you will know that you need to do some quick but competent analysis/discovery. Third, in most cases, the leaders know that they will need to make some trade-offs, but until now, have been reluctant to really step fully into that zone of leadership, because now it gets hard. Now sacrifices need to be made, people might be disappointed; customers might be disappointed, and so forth.

How do we get our team leaders to actionable decisions as quickly as possible? My answer is by managing time. Make things happen quickly. Make people trust their first order decisions. Our team leaders need to believe in what they know. And then they need to be put on a tight timeline to deliver the first order answers, the answers to the second order questions, and so forth.

Now I want to say a word about collaboration. Many times the planning process has been used to get everyone involved. I completely endorse the principle. However, too many times, collaboration ends up being a substitute for quality and speed. If you get perhaps fifteen people involved, and each of the groups bring in selected experts, you will create a lot of collaboration. But, more than anything, if you want “ownership” throughout the organization, “act” on what comes out of the process.