Creating inspirational plans

“There are only Monster Missions, all other missions are useless.”

A bold thought, assertively put.
This was the message of the Keynote speaker I had to follow at a Planners conference in San Francisco.
His style was compelling.  An extemporising 6 foot 5inch (198cm) ex-military strategist from West Point who worked on the Operation Desert Shield plans for the first Iraq war in the 90’s.
Simple, focused, clear. With a single-minded aim that everyone understood and everyone had a part to play to make it happen.

“Kill Saddam.”  That was it. All we needed to know – the Monster Mission.

His ending was as studied to enthral his audience as his start, although it was more quietly delivered: “Mission failed”, with dramatic pause:
“For now”.
A genuine OMG moment as we looked around and thought ‘they’re going to go back’. Which they did.
Never lost the focus of where they were going and what they had to achieve.
A clear, if chilling, example of alignment of an organisation saying what it will do with behaviour to match.
It is a classic planning technique to borrow from military strategy to name an enemy e.g. Nike’s past aim was to “Crush Adidas”.
We were sold.

Not an easy act to follow.

Context matters and what suits one organisational culture is anathema to another.
The desires are generally the same – to make efficient sustainable progress, overcoming barriers that get in the way of the roadmap for the journey to a defined future “Vision of Success”.
To which end we design plans, intending to focus and inspire resultant action.
Give people a clear sense of where the organisation is headed, how it intends to get there and how people in the organisation are expected to behave in tune with shared values – ‘our culture’.  Who we are, how we behave with each other with common goals.

Focus is on defining a particular market, highlighting a competitive distinctive capability, defining a special added value for customers - and plans should contain a spotlight on emerging needs. 

This last point is often an area of weakness.

It demands genuine interest in customers. Curiosity is an innate drive. Insights are game-changers. What gets measured gets done is an old adage – ensure your plans have flexibility of resources for people to exploit changes and deal with surprises.

Hands up who wants to be the next Kodak?
Plans are a focused means to an end – outwitting the competition in customer attraction.
The rationale is obvious, the logic of the requirement hard to deny and formatting of plans – there are plenty of schematics on line to borrow from, yet…
"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley"
What my fellow Scotsman, the poet Robert Burns meant was …

Things often go wrong even though you have carefully planned what you are going to do.
Twice as many people are actively dis-engaged at work as are actively engaged (source: Gallup averages on employee engagement surveys 26%:13%) while the majority are neither (61%).
Most people would not care if 74% of food brands disappeared completely in the UK. (source: Havas Media’s Meaningful Brands UK 2015)

What causes this mis-aligment?
It is an ongoing investigation:

In the data of Great Places to Work (www.greatplacetowork.co.uk), of the very best places to work, it cites 6 elements of what makes them the best places. Top of the list is that they have a clear direction.

Mission, vision, value and purpose.
That’s just looking around inside an organisation.
From the outside more and more organisations are being exposed as not doing what they say, with the guilty being increasing hounded and battered on-line.
Think on News of The World, Williams & Glyn and United Airlines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo - widely reported that within 4 weeks of the video being posted online, stock price fell 10%, costing stockholders about $180 million in value.

Please look at your plans and ask yourself

• is this relevant to the customer, credible for our organisation to achieve and distinctive from the competition?

Watch out for the Monsters inside and Outside the room. [email protected]