Modify the strategies in light of new information

If we make a visit late in the fiscal year to one of those one-in-20 firms that creates a business plan, we’ll often encounter a flurry of activity. Goals will be established (“revenues will be 10 percent more than last year”), budgets will be assembled, and strategies will be created.

When it’s all done, it often will carry an atmosphere of finality usually reserved for the conclusion of a successful root canal (“well, at least that’s over”). This, of course, is exactly what we should expect.

After all, business owners have been taught for years that they should make a plan for the coming year, and the best time to do that is at the end of the previous year. And when it’s done, they won’t have to deal with it until next year. This notion is propagated by the use of a linear outline, such as the one we showed you a few pages back. It implies that there is a beginning and an end to the process, and that we can relax a bit after it’s all done.

We know that the planning process, however, is a never-ending one. It goes around and around like a clock. And that’s the way we like to think about it—a constantly moving process.

We’ve depicted this in the following diagram, titled The Business Planning Map. This diagram illustrates that the planning process goes around and around constantly. It only stops when you break away from the business (for example, when you sell or retire), and it requires your constant attention.

Like the sailboat captain who is constantly assessing his situation and creating new strategies, you can use your new information to constantly create new strategies for your business. You have an entire company of CIAs (Company Intelligence Agents) ferreting out relevant data. Now it’s up to you to use that data to formulate a course of action.

Your planning activities must not wait for a once-at-the-end-of-the-year push. You must be doing this constantly, getting your CIA agents constantly collecting information so that you can make corrections as needed.

By using the Spider Diagram as an updating tool, you can constantly detect changes in the environment that will affect your firm. As the information from your “web” is analyzed, you have the opportunity to create new strategies—strategies that will make you successful in your new environment. Like the spider, you should do this all the time—your environment doesn’t change only at the time of your annual planning cycle. When you operate like this, you truly have the tools to be nimble and adaptable.

The real advantage of the Spider Diagram is to stimulate you to think about the planning process on a regular basis. The diagram is so simple that you’ll memorize it easily, and you’ll start to think about the effects of changes in your environment on any possible changes to your strategies.

Here’s an analogy for this type of heightened awareness—in this case the awareness that planning is a constant process. If you close your eyes for a minute and try to recall all the blue items around you, you’ll likely create a modest list. If you then open your eyes and look for blue items, the list likely will be much longer. After all, now you know what to look for: blue things. When you are aware of the constant importance of your planning process, and for the information that will build that process, you’ll look for things that you never saw beforehand.

So now, with a heightened sense of awareness, you and your team can look constantly for new information needed to create new strategies and goals. You can simply use it to challenge your team to answer these three key questions:

1. What has changed in the four categories?

2. In light of any changes in the four categories, what should be our strategies?

3. In light of our available strategies, what is the range for our goals, which should be challenging yet reasonable?

Both of these stories might prompt you to think about ways that you can harness the creativity of your entire team to generate similar ideas. Simply tell them your intentions, allow them to provide ideas, and thank and reward them for the ideas that you use.