Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road should I take?” she asked. “Where are you going?” he replied. “I don’t know.” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

—LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Virtually every executive says he has a plan for success—yet for many the plan is in their heads and not on paper. The reasons for not writing the plan range from a belief that others would not understand it, to not having sufficient time to write it, to being afraid that a plan will limit his options. Some ask, “Which is more important, taking action or spending time to plan?” Our response is that action by high potentials in the absence of a written-out, thoroughly understood plan yields inferior results and wastes resources.

The planning process is often more valuable than the plan itself. Conversations in all three perspectives—listening to each other, questioning each other, and considering what else is possible—are vital in preparing people to take action, aligning their actions, and enabling them to adjust when unexpected events occur. No organization-wide conversations are more vital than those that build a strategic plan. Yes, it takes valuable time to create or update a strategic plan and the tactical plans that support it. Yet high-performing leaders value the learning and alignment that occur during the planning process and use those conversations to drive unified action.

Some executives voice their aversion to planning by asking, “I don’t have time to be good. How can I skip to being great instead?” The challenge with these clients is that they truly want us to answer this question, and they would prefer a root canal to the effort required to build a plan. They want the secret sauce, the silver bullet, the easy way to create a vision and alignment. Their let’s-get-it-done management mindset pushes them to skip planning.

These executives feel overloaded, yet they themselves are creating that feeling. Their actions are driven by a reactive sense of urgency rather than a set of widely understood and accepted priorities. They remain stuck until they realize that a thorough plan that addresses transformational possibilities will produce a higher return on their time investment than a single-minded focus on efficiency. They get unstuck when they begin to view the world through the eyes of stakeholders, customers, and employees. Then they willingly invest the time to develop a great strategy, build a comprehensive plan, create alignment, and initiate great actions. In a complex world, you need a simple but powerful plan to ensure that everyone’s actions are aligned.

Planning requires you to identify alternatives, discuss them, and select the best approach. So gather your team virtually or physically to discuss the changes everyone is seeing, examine the options, and plan your response. As we have noted previously, the time you spend in up-front planning conversations will invariably be less than the time you would otherwise spend correcting the unintended and potentially costly consequences of poorly planned and misaligned actions. The plan must be in writing so that people who did not participate directly in the planning process can understand the plan, know the assumptions and alternatives considered, and rally behind its implementation.

Planning Is an Essential Conversation

In our experience, people who think strategically, hold planning conversations, and write plans to codify their decisions achieve most of their goals. A plan that exists only in your head cannot drive unified action throughout your organization. If you are extremely busy doing your job, thinking strategically to create a plan will produce a net savings of time. It will ensure that you and the high potentials who work for you are focusing on strategically important actions.

So why is a formal planning process not standard practice in all organizations? As high potentials, you and other senior executives are capable of effective individual action without a written plan because of your experience and skills. But your actions cannot be replicated by others if they have no plan to follow. Your excuses for not writing a plan may seem plausible to you only because the benefits of a written plan will not be visible until you have written one and seen the improved actions that it causes to take place.

In consumer product companies, the marketing group spends months each year in extended brand reviews and market planning sessions. Tim, a freshly minted MBA, at first felt that the conversations were a colossal waste of time. Yet after the first cycle, he saw that planning was a catalyst for effective action. During the planning cycle, daily routines were set aside to meet with customers, market analysts, salespeople, manufacturing specialists, and others. With everyone contributing ideas, the conversations brought freshness and ultimately alignment to the diverse group. The plan also empowered Tim’s brand group to take action and expend resources for the rest of the year without further permission as long as the actions were consistent with the approved plan and budget.

Planning conversations are an opportunity for stakeholders to discuss the difficult, the unknown, the improbable, and the impossible. Because conversations create value only when action is taken, the planning discussions must end to allow the plan to be put into action. Leaders must ensure that high potentials complete their plans and put them into action in a timely manner to harvest the fruits of planning:

Strategic plans should be insightful, yet simple enough to be easily implemented. At the end of each planning conversation, shift the focus from what is possible to ironing out execution techniques and defining measures of success.

Guiding People to Deliver Value

Some of the best conversations we have seen during strategic planning workshops were focused on envisioning what the marketplace and customers will look like in three to five years. These conversations enable you to define changes to your products and services and how to make the changes in a way that maximizes value. The concept of a customer is clear in private industry, yet it often is a second-tier consideration in other sectors. However, the core mission of every organization is to satisfy the needs of an external group—and that must be the purpose of your strategic plan. Because resources are finite, tactical operating plans in such areas as personnel, marketing, manufacturing, logistics, and finance may be needed to support the strategy. A sound strategy identifies key customers today and in the future and focuses on developing the capabilities required to satisfy their needs.

Ideas never grow to full bloom in a comment box. They come from people who care enough to imagine a better solution or a smoother process—people who feel compelled to accomplish great things. They think outside your box because they draw on different experiences. Their contributions are vital in developing the strategy because no one knows everything, and one of your jobs is to be a learner. Great ideas often begin with one person’s idea and mature into breakthroughs during conversations that add other views. The key is to cultivate ideas at their inception. Find and nurture the kernel of creativity and guide it through the conversations necessary to incorporate it into the strategic plan and put it into action.

In Theory, Goals are Fixed—In Reality, They Evolve

Great plans integrate inputs from multiple sources and evolve to replace assumptions with facts. In some organizations, planning seems to be either a top-down or bottom-up process. The most effective planning process is both. Yet responsibility to initiate the planning process, set goals, facilitate conversations, and push the plan to completion remains with top leaders.

Every strategic plan starts at the current point in the organization’s history, projects where the organization wants to go, and defines a strategy to get there. The plan becomes the best guess at that moment in time. But plans need to evolve continually. Having a plan is critical, but the conversations and process that created the plan are also useful once the action begins. A thorough planning process improves the information available, the decision-making skills of participants, and the ability to adjust to evolving circumstances and move decisively to new actions in the heat of battle.

Actions create learning. As you and your high potentials learn, goals will evolve and the strategies to reach them may shift. Your organization’s position relative to the marketplace and competitors will change constantly. The key to successful execution of your plan is to look for indicators that confirm or contradict the assumptions on which it was based. If necessary, modify the plan and ensure that the entire organization aligns with and implements the new actions.

Tell Everyone What the Plan Says

Plans are not secrets to be guarded. In the 1980s, when strategic planning was in its infancy as a discipline, companies held strategic plans closely. At one consumer products company, the early strategic plans were numbered and given only to division presidents, who were told not to make copies even for their direct reports. Division presidents cooperated to implement the plan, but could not (in theory) disclose information from the plan to managers in their division—even though those managers helped write it. Would you be surprised to hear that the company went through a multiyear period of declining earnings? If you are hesitant to share some elements of your plan—say, the pricing algorithm or the formula for your secret sauce—then redact those portions, but share the rest of the plan as widely as possible.

All members of your organization should be aware of salient parts of the plan if you expect them to put it into action. Once a plan is written, follow it unless and until it is changed. It should be a guide for every decision and every action. Because high-potential executives do what they say they will do, by signing off on the plan they are committing to follow its direction and lead its implementation. They also are committing to help others put the plan into action. That is why you wrote a strategic plan in the first place: to ensure that everyone pursues the same goals using an aligned strategy.

The focus of a strategic plan may also be biased based on the functional group that prepares it. When written by finance, it naturally emphasizes capital requirements and budgeting. When it is written by marketing, the focus usually will be new products, improved sales processes, and expanded distribution. When written by a stand-alone strategic planning department, it might be more elegantly written yet be somewhat disconnected from the organization’s true capabilities. The solution: align silos during the planning conversations, the writing, and the implementation of the plan.

Making Midcourse Corrections

A Navy midshipman’s initial assignment on an aircraft carrier was to work with the navigator to plan the voyage from Norfolk, Virginia, to Naples, Italy, in hour-by-hour detail. When the ship left Norfolk, he was reassigned to the Engineering Department, yet he visited the navigator’s shack every morning to check the ship’s position. He was shocked to find that it was off course every day compared to the plan. Unexpected events like engine failures and circumnavigating a fishing fleet occurred while crossing the Atlantic and disrupted the plan. However, by knowing the ship’s current position, its destination, and the target time of arrival, the navigator calmly calculated course and speed corrections for the captain. Six days later, the ship cruised through the Straits of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean Sea on schedule despite having been off-course every day.

Your career plan and your strategic plan are similar in two respects to that ocean crossing. First, unexpected events will delay or disrupt every plan you make, and how well you handle those disruptions will be a major factor in your success. Second, you must hold regular conversations to measure interim results and uncover deviations from the plan. Determine what caused them and make corrections to get back on course. Strategy is an important start, yet your ability to adapt effectively to unexpected developments will largely determine your success.