I’m going to tell you about a simple planning process I’ve used for years successfully helping small businesses, community groups, and myself.
Several years ago I worked at a nonprofit with a boss who facilitated amazing meetings. She encouraged me to enroll in facilitation training and I learned a lot about how to help individuals and small groups work through problems.
Last year I used one of those facilitation processes on my own business with my wife.
Since 2010 I've been running a solo online business, Day of the Shirt, and my wife has always offered to help. I've handed off tasks and small projects, but we wanted 2017 to be the year where we worked together to sustain and grow the business. We needed to be on the same page on high level goals, and we also needed some immediate and weighty-feeling tasks to collaborate on. So we blocked out a half day during our holiday break, sat on the floor with our laptops, and worked through this process to plan our year.
The 4 step process
It's this simple:
- List the goals or objectives you want to accomplish
- List the barriers that prevent, or frustrate, or slow down accomplishing those goals
- List concrete activities you can do to overcome or diminish those barriers and move towards your goals
- Select the most important activities, commit, schedule and get them done!
My wife and I used this process for a business planning, but it's a useful process for anything that seems difficult or hard to tackle.
How to do it
You need to focus on a specific period of time to calibrate your goals. Typical business planing will look out 1-5 years, but it also scales down to a quarter or even planning out a particularly pivotal day or week.
The most important parts of doing this process successfully are:
- Block out sufficient time to reflect. I’ll spend 15 minutes to plan a day, and half a day to plan a year.
- For each stage, start by brain-dumping without self-criticism or judgement. Then pick out a few patterns or similarities that tie them together.
- Be vulnerable. Barriers can sometimes be inside yourself or your company. Don't over-edit or self-sensor.
- Do it as a team. If you work with others, invite their participation. In a group format, it's important at each stage to say "Let's take 6 minutes to quietly and individually write down our [goals/barriers/actions]" before you share so that you can avoid groupthink. Also, don't let people criticize or try to diminish someone else's responses; leave prioritization until the end.
- When you get to the final stage, commit to doing it. When my wife and I finished our planning, we had our first 3 months of deadlines already on the calendar. When I plan my day, I expect to be done with my barriers by lunch.
Why it works
“Make the change easy, then make the easy change” — Kent Beck
The process, when followed through, helps connect your most important goals with the activities that are necessary for them to be successful.
Many people’s avoidance behavior happens because there is a lot of fear in the gulf between what they need and what they feel safe asking for. This process helps get all of that out on the table and affirm the value of those activities because they're connected to the goals.
Today, when I look at what my wife and I came up a year ago, they seem like obvious improvements. But I think that if we had just dove into 2017 it would have taken a lot of disagreement and discord to discover them. And looking back at our activities, we accomplished 90% of them 🙌
What can go wrong
Once you have your plan, you have to execute through your barriers to get to what you really want to achieve. The process has the potential to enable avoidance and procrastination if you allow yourself to continually revisit the planning phase and “discover” new barriers. Keep checking in on your plan, but keep trust in it too.
You have to be accountable to your initial goals. The process works because you’re overcoming barriers AND achieving your goals. If you’re not committed to the goal, you can waste a lot of time breaking down nonexistent barriers. Accountability was actually a barrier my wife and I identified in our own planning (that's pretty common); implementing time tracking and weekly review meetings were the activities that came out of that.
When successful, this process will give you the most strategic/important/impactful activities to focus on. But it's not an operational plan that will encompass everything ever to be done. Reassure yourself and others that the intent is accomplish your existing goals better, not to pivot to something else entirely.
Where to start
Block off some time, grab some sticky notes, a sharpie and a big wall. My wife and I don't have a big wall in our apartment so we used Stickies.io.
This is a stripped down practice from the Technology of Participation. They offer trainings all over the world, or you can read this book, or you can ask me questions in the comments 👋
Happy chomping! 🌯