It is that time of year again. We are in the midst of our annual planning for 2024.
If you haven't started planning for your business (or yourself), now is a great time to start.
The best place to start is to analyze where you are and where you've come from. I like to begin annual planning by reviewing the past year and looking back at where we were three years ago (in order to note direction, progress, and new capabilities).
Then it is time to look forward.
The process is relatively straightforward. We start by deciding what the company's three highest priority goals are. With those goals as the base, each department (and manager) creates a big three representing what they can do to reach the company's big three. From there, we dive into quarterly rocks, SMARTs (goals that are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timed), as well as the explicit tactical steps it will take to accomplish what we set out to achieve. We use the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to plan and execute our meetings.
The meetings are going well. There is a lot of back-and-forth idea sharing, negotiating, and priority setting.
We've gotten a lot better at dialogue - but for many years, what we thought was a dialogue was often multiple monologues.
The disconnect (or misconnect) was because the participants had fundamental beliefs, at a higher level than we were discussing, that were at odds with each other.
I shot two videos that I think help teams get to alignment.
Thinking About Your Thinking
The first video discusses several techniques to enhance your decision-making.
One of the ideas is something called "Think, Feel, Know." It explains that you have to deal with superficial thoughts before getting to deeper feelings. Then, you must deal with those feelings before you get to "knowing."
Another technique discussed in the video involves adding time to look for "insights" after working on something. Those insights are often the seeds for something greater.
Chunking Higher
The second video is about how to chunk high enough to start from a place of agreement. Exploring distinctions from there is relatively easy.
I'll add one more concept for good measure ... Start with the end in mind. Alignment happens in stages. To get aligned on what to do next, you first have to get agreement and alignment about where you are and where you want to go.
With that said, another important component of meaningful communication is a shared understanding of a common language. Words can mean different things to different people. Simply agreeing on a "word" is different than agreeing on a common meaning.
To summarize these concepts:
- Make sure you have a common language
- Begin with the end in mind
- Start with the highest level of agreement
- Make distinctions from there
Hope that helps.
