Planning Top Tips!
Planning Top Tips!
- Start with your why - who do you exist to help and why, what is your strategy and how does your planning fit into this?
- Think about power - who has the power and why, how can you use planning as a way to give more power to the right places, how can you use the process as an opportunity to build trust and connection?
- Give planning time and space - planning uses different muscles and people need time to think creatively and about the big picture
- Plan for the plan - people need to know what the key dates and deadline are
Early in the process be clear about roles and responsibilities, who takes decisions here, about what? - Bring the elephants into the room - what happens if people disagree about priorities? Think about this early on in the process, come up with a process, together, before you need one.
- You can’t prioritise everything - be brave about de-prioritising and re-phasing, make these choices together. This article might give you some useful ideas
- Cross-dependencies - make sure you have time in the process to cross-reference plans between teams so everyone knows what is needed from them
- Planning doesn’t end on 31st March - build in quarterly review points to reflect on progress, learning and to update plans accordingly
- Use some visual tools - to help people to think differently - we love ones which use the natural World so all plans need to consider:
- What elements are their red woods; their strong healthy branches that must be maintained?
- Which elements are their wild flowers; creative new ideas to test and explore?
- Which elements are green shoots; may be wild flowers this year that have been tried and tested, time to decide what to learn and take forward?
- And to do all of this we know that plants can’t survive in crowded spaces so we need to think about clearing the seed beds
Get in touch if we can help you to navigate any of these steps!