Planning and prioritisation essential for outstanding organisations

Planning and prioritisation essential for outstanding organisations: but must use feedback to manage unpredictability.

Extract from LDRLB – Karen Martin:

Recently, I’ve been seeing more and more organizations and business pundits pushing back against the idea of planning and prioritization. The argument often is that since the world is so unpredictable, there is little point to planning, and flexibility and adaptability are more important than focus. I think that this perspective is gaining traction because of a misunderstanding of the work of some popular writers such as Tim Harford and Malcolm Gladwell among others.

Both Harford and Gladwell talk about the unpredictability of the future—and the danger of plans that don’t take unpredictability into account. In his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Harford declared that “plans are out.” Gladwell, for his part, declared in a 2010 interview with the Association for Manufacturing Excellence that the economic crisis should remind us that “you can’t really engage in effective prediction.” Even Jim Collins begins his latest book, Great by Choice, with a cold fact: “We cannot predict the future.”

Advocates of unpredictability and the need to be able to react to changing conditions are absolutely right.

Plans that do not take into account the possibility of changing conditions and don’t build in feedback loops to assess whether underlying conditions have changed are unhelpful and often dangerous. But this is a critique of a method of planning and execution, not of planning itself. Unfortunately, some readers of Harford, Gladwell, and their compatriots are confusing the two. And some have missed Collins’ second sentence: “But we can create it.” Just as most leaders confuse complexity with complication, anti-plan advocates and their adherents confuse poor plans with planning in general.

Borrowing an analogy from my colleague, Mike Rother (Toyota Kata), think of planning as standing at the entrance of a dark alley where you have little idea of what is ahead. Charging head first at full speed into this alley is obviously unwise. Moving very slowly and shifting your focus based on every bump you hit or noise you hear is equally unlikely to yield very good results. The right approach to planning is like turning on a flashlight. It will begin to show you what’s ahead so that you can move at a faster pace. This doesn’t mean that you again start charging headlong down the alley or that you take one quick glance and turn the flashlight off again.

Planning and prioritization, done right, are indispensable for achieving focus and, in turn, for becoming an outstanding organization. By done right, I mean you need to have clarity about your organization and its performance, go and see, build consensus, establish clear metrics that provide feedback, and listen to every level of your organization during both prioritization and execution. As you gain expertise with this approach to prioritization and planning, you’ll find, I think, that your metaphorical flashlight gets brighter (although that doesn’t justify overconfidence).

There are plenty of organizations where planning is done poorly, and then leaders force adherence to these poor plans, ignoring new information about whether the plan is working or worthwhile. But excessive rigidity of this type is less common in my experience than organizational ADD, which invites a shift in focus at the first sign of change or distraction or a new condition that introduces error into the original plan. Fortunately, consensus-driven prioritization improves the quality of predictions and, in the event that those predictions do not come to pass, will help you determine where and when to change course.

NB This is a guest post from Karen Martin, an experienced consultant and thought leader in lean business practices. This post is adapted from her recent book The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence.

More … http://ldrlb.co/2013/01/anti-planning-zeitgeist-embrace-it-at-your-peril/