Do you have a plan?

Later this spring we will share our school’s new strategic plan. The planning process involved hundreds of voices, dozens of meetings, several full-day retreats, and countless revisions to carefully crafted statements. 

As we close in on the completion of this new plan I’ve been thinking about the amount of time  that has gone into this process. 

So. Much. Time.

And as my eyes went blurry staring at my monitor earlier this week, this question bubbled up…

Do you have a plan? More specifically, do you have your own strategic plan?

The answer? Yes...and no.

Yes, I have certain habits and systems that I’ve developed to help me slowly chart a course to becoming the aspirational version of myself—a moving target that I will never hit.

But have I spent time with my wife and family carefully planning out our desired end state and how we’re going to get there? No.

I’ve spent all this time planning for a professional organization and can’t say I’ve come close to investing the same level of thought, time, and energy into planning for my family.

Of course after realizing this, the dissonance sank in and the internal dialogues began.

Hey Kyle, what’s the most important thing to you?

“Oh, family! Definitely family!”

Oh yeah? Tell me more about how you spend all this time planning for your employer and don’t make a similar investment at home for what you claim is the most important thing in your life!

Dissonance is uncomfortable and motivating.Well, now that you’ve listened to a 30-second dialogue in my head, let’s jump into some of the things that came up as I thought about this question.

Planning is everything 

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ‘emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.” (General Dwight D. Eisenhower)

Plans are worthless because they typically provide a singular course of action that assumes an endless variety of variables all behave exactly as you need. 

This never happens. 

Remember what Mike Tyson said? “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” 

But even if you planned on being punched in the mouth, you can’t plan for how quickly it happens or how your body will react. Even the most detailed plans can’t account for every possible variable. 

So does that mean we shouldn’t plan? Your plan is still valuable because when the unexpected happens, you can take this new data point and overlay it onto the plan to see what needs to change. 

Planning is clarifying

Another reason planning is so critical is that the process is clarifying. Where are we going? Where do we not want to end up? How can we accomplish this? Endless possibilities is not actually the best way to approach a problem. Planning helps you narrow down the possibilities and look for the right tools and the right approach at that time. 

Work the plan

Planning is useful and can help you better understand the direction you’re heading and the action steps along the way, but a plan is useless if you’re not willing to work. No amount of wishful thinking is going to will something into existence. 

Short-term—long term

Five-year plan?

One-year plan?

One-month plan?

One-week plan?

One-day plan?

Try them all!

Use a process

I’ve really enjoyed watching our deputy superintendent facilitate various meetings during my time here at SAS. She has an incredible skill for keeping people on track and arriving at the desired destination. Part of this comes from the fact that she plans the protocols and processes for the meeting so carefully. There are incredible tools that can be used for leading a planning session. She recently shared a book with me called Groups at Work that has a wide variety of protocols you can use to ensure you draw out the best ideas along the way.

Be thoughtful but don’t go overboard

Yes, this is something worth investing time in at the beginning. You want to get the pieces in place. But you also don’t want to spend so much time investing in a plan that you get lost in the planning and never move into action. You have to eventually work the plan to see if your assumptions produce results or if you need to reevaluate things. 

Planning is professional and personal

And we’re right back where we started. This is my biggest takeaway from this week. I need to invest more time and be more thoughtful about planning my family life. We often use this Patrick Lencioni phrase at work, “team one.” It’s this idea that as a senior leadership team our duty is toward one another and the organization as a whole, not to the individual teams we lead. At the surface, it makes sense. When we need to make a major decision, I can’t be looking at things only through the communication lens and thinking about what’s best for my individual department. 

But what happens when personal and professional overlap?

Who is my team one?

It’s my family. And if they are my team one then I should be allocating more time and resources to ensuring my plan for that team is really dialed in.

Some other questions that popped up….

• How do you know when to push forward with the plan as it is, or to pivot and make some adjustments, or to retreat and devise an entirely new approach?
• Is there someone who has already built a plan similar to what I need that i can build from?
• Whose voices need to be part of the planning process?
• Am I overcomplicating this plan?