How to plan for total success

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Over the past 20 years, I've visited over 30 countries, worked with hundreds of teams—over 300—from large companies like Google to modest startups. In that time, it became evident that 90% of failures stem from poor planning, from insufficient planning. In my experience, whether it’s at the inception of projects, the beginning of a year, at the start of anything you're planning, if you take the time to plan well at the beginning, you avoid most mistakes, many of the problems and errors that would otherwise show up later.

So, the question is:

How do we make you into an excellent planner?

There are essentially three steps to a better planning process, three steps you can apply to any project, to an entire year ahead of time, or any event, personal or professional, that you want to create—you could apply it to your next family picnic, for instance.

A few years ago, I was coaching a top-level sales team at Kenzo, of the Louis Vuitton Group, and their goal was to organize a conference to focus on their luxury items. I challenged the sales team: “So, how good is this conference going to be?” I asked.

“Well, you know,” they admitted, “we are a little bit behind in planning.” “Some things we need to do a little bit later,” someone added. “Yeah, it's on our to-do list.”

Waiting until the last minute to do something. It’s a signal of less-than-optimal success ahead because it's basically reactive. It’s adapting to whatever happens at the time and pray that it’s going to go well. In most cases, people say, with relief, “Well, we made it!” And celebrate a marginal, reduced level of success.

That’s is not what we want! We want to achieve the maximum potential from the event. How do we do that? By reverse-engineering it.

So now, let me introduce these three highly effective steps to planning for success.

1 – Visualize Success

The first step is really exciting. Actually, it's a mind shift. You have to allow yourself to imagine total success. Some people will resist this. They will argue, “I am a realistic person. I can't just fantasize about things.” Well, I don’t want you to just fantasize. I want you to visualize total success. And you can do it alone, on your own: Take a piece of paper and write things down to capture how this would look. Or do it as a team, which can be a lot of fun—people love doing this. But you must explain that everyone needs to be inclusive, and welcome any idea or suggestion—no filtering.

The first thing I ask my clients is, “What would be top, the ultimate outcome?” For instance, with the sales team I mentioned above, I asked, “What would be topmost for your big sales event?” And they went wild! “We want this guy… We want that… We should do this…, and this, and this, and that…” I encouraged them further. “What if you had all the tools, all the means, to make it great? What would you do?”

They noted every idea they had on separate pages, loads of them. And we collected them all and put them in buckets, pulling them out one at a time and reading them. “Okay, what about this idea?” “And what about this?” When we were done, we had a real view of what an amazing success of their conference would look like.

That's step number one. I call this “creating the green dot” in my best-selling book What Color Is Your Sky? Creating the green dot. Doing this means that at the end of the year, you can ask yourself, “What is the story I want to tell?” That’s what you write. You write your story, the story of success you envision for yourself.

2 – Set clear ownership goals

In step one, you wrote a lot of things, free flow, with lots of permission. You gave yourself full permission to write ambitious things, yet some of these things are not so crazy. They're simply ambitious.

Now, the idea is to make all of these buckets of ideas your realistic goals. Here is an effective way to do this: “WWWH.” You start by writing on a piece of paper what needs to be done, and by whom. That's really important because you need someone to own this task. So often, in companies, the whom is not very clear. It's a bunch of people, it's a committee, it's whatever. But nobody's accountable.

The what needs to be very specific: What will we observe? What will we get? What will be done? The whom is a person, and the person can have a team around them, but one single person needs to be named—not two, not three. And then, when is it supposed to be done? This needs to be a realistic date.

The H should not be how we will do it, or how we will control it, and not how we will micromanage these things. The H is: How will we know it's done? This is the best way to avoid a bunch of micromanaged tasks centered on it and to free your time.

“WWWH” is an extremely effective system. I taught this to most managers at Nespresso, and dozens of managers at Louis Vuitton, and they loved it. It simplifies everything.

Now, if you are the manager above, all you need to do is to really make sure people manage those WWWHs. This is a good high-performance habit.

3 – Anticipate failures and broken agreements

Step three is about anticipating. Now that you know what you're going to be doing, you want to plan for disaster. You are going to do the opposite of planning for success. Instead, you're going to say, “Imagine the worst thing that can happen”—some of them probably will happen. You want to brainstorm with your team about what could go wrong: Do we have the right resources? Is this the right person? Are people are going to be involved with it? What is the worst thing that can happen? You can also perform this as a team-building exercise.

The idea is to share your plan, your goals, with people and to listen to them after you ask, “What will derail my plan?” They'll come back to you very creative suggestions, such as: “You will not get a sufficient budget,” “The budget will come too late,” “Your suppliers are not going to make it,” “You're going to get sick”—all of these make you more aware of possible failure points.

Once you finish this third step, you will, very likely, need to go back to step two to refine your goals. You may even add a few more tasks because now you're seeing a few potential loopholes: “We don't have insurance on this,” “We didn't double-check [you know]”, or “We need to double down on making sure they make it there.” All of these are issues to double down on—doing it, for sure; being intentional—these make a whole big difference.

In summary: first, visualize success—open permission; second, set goals, identifying specific owners of the delivery of each goal; third, anticipate the worst and adjust accordingly.

For this powerful process to deliver its promise, you must become intentional about following up on the delivery of WWWHs, hold regular meetings to check progress and adapt to unpredicted events. In most cases, the people involved become self-managed and more creative in resolving their problems. The results are systematically well beyond all expectations.

To fully develop your leadership impact, learn more about our accelerated leadership program XCELERATOR. If you have any questions, please comment below. I read every single comment and am happy to offer you my help.