Engage everyone in collecting information

As we noted previously, most business plans are created at the end of the fiscal year, as a once-a-year activity. Typically, a great deal of energy and time is expended by the team to collect and analyze information, create strategies and goals, and write the plan—all in a short period of time.

This is a bit like preparing for a track meet by working out the week before the event. We’ll have expended some effort, for sure, but our results are likely to be disappointing. Things might have been different, however, if a training regimen had been a regular part of our life style, rather than a last-minute rush.

So, how can we change this? How can you get everyone to value and participate in a planning process? How can you make it a part of your organization’s culture?

Actually, the answer to these questions is almost too simple: You allow, encourage, and make it fun for everyone to participate in the process. You allow it by opening yourself to the notion that, indeed, everyone can make a valuable contribution. After all, everyone (collectively) is smarter than one person (you).

You encourage it by coaching everyone on the four specific categories of information you seek and the ways in which they can help you collect it. The business plan outline and the tools we’ll discuss will help you do this.

You make it fun by showing everyone the plans you create, describing how those plans flowed from the contributions they made in assisting you, and praising and rewarding them for those contributions. In other words, you provide a link between their efforts and the group’s results.

These examples illustrate how easy it is to collect the information that is important to you. Virtually everyone in your organization is likely to be bombarded by useful information.

You just need to coach them to recognize and retrieve the information that is useful for your planning process. You don’t need to hire additional staff or create an “Information Collection Department.” The information is literally right in front of everyone in your company, every day. Unfortunately, many companies too often leave it right there instead of bringing it home.