How You Make a Plan Matters More Than the Plan Itself

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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

This week, I want to talk about how you make a plan matters more than the plan itself. This comes from Arlin Sorensen, of course, July 2nd of this year, and it comes from a newsletter from Bruce Eckfeldt called The Better Faster Newsletter. I've been saying for decades now that the process of building plans, specifically strategic plans, is much, much more important than the output. So, I've seen our members create strategic plans that were very simple, one sheet, maybe a poster, and I've seen our members create 80-page spreadsheet, chart, table, narrative things that looked like they came from corporate America.

The end product matters much, much less, in my opinion, than the process of planning itself. Why? The process of doing strategic planning creates alignment. And just as your automobile requires alignment to track normally as you drive, your organization needs alignment. You can imagine if you've got people working on conflicting priorities and sort of running about scattershot all over. That organization's going to be much less effective than one where people are focused on a set of common goals and outcomes. And so, the process is so much more important than the final output. Okay? Eckfeldt says, "Companies fail to recognize that the planning process itself determines whether a strategy succeeds or fails." I agree. He also says that "People judge the quality of the plan by the sophistication of the final document." Again, I agree. But it shouldn't be that way, so he offers four tips.

The first, process is greater than documents. Who's on the planning team, critically important. Those people shouldn't be necessarily the most senior. They should be the best brains. Right? And you do want to pick people from various departments in the organization. It shouldn't just be the five C-suite people or the three or whatever it is. You want people from different parts of the organization. How do decisions get made? Is it just everything the CEO says? Boom, it carries all the weight, and it's a done deal, or is there opportunity for open debate and discussion? How decisions get made is really important.

How do you build alignment? Well, the process itself builds alignment. I can guarantee you that having witnessed it dozens and dozens of times over the years. You can imagine that for the first time, perhaps, you've invited a superintendent or a project manager into the company planning process. First of all, that person should be a good thinker and should be able to add value. But now suddenly this person is brought in to the highest level of decision-making in the organization. Is that person going to experience more or less alignment with the direction of the company at that point? Well, it's more, of course. And the more people you can get involved in the process... You can't have a meeting with 200 people. I'm not saying that. But to the degree that you can do surveys and things, we'll come to that, to the degree you can involve more people in the planning process, the more alignment and the more uptake, the more ownership you're going to get.

Right, so number two, engagement creates ownership, I think is the point I'm trying to make. If a small group plans the strategy, right? You've got three people, and then they come out of the room, and they announce it, "Boom, this is our strategy." That works less well than gathering up people throughout the organization. I remember I had a friend that worked for a public company a few years ago, and they came out and announced their number one goal for the year was to increase EBITDA. Well, okay, most of us have read, we know what EBITDA is, okay?

But in this multi-thousand-person organization, did the people moving boxes from line A to line B, did the people driving the trucks, did the people sweeping up the floors of the warehouses, did those people know what EBITDA even was? How is that a good, compelling, motivating goal for any company? And that, to me, stinks of the C-suite people getting together and coming up with this thing. And it made sense to them clearly, and it made sense potentially to the investors. Okay, I'm good with that. But to the people actually doing the work day-to-day, how did it make any sense to them at all? Anyway, my friend no longer works for that company.

Get people involved. Create small teams. So, I've got a strategic planning project team of let's say 10 people. I want those 10 people to go out and discuss in the organization with their teams, "Hey, we're thinking about this. What are your ideas?" The ideas may be crazy. They may be insane. But they may be wonderful. But the idea that you're asking in the first place is what you're looking for. That's how you create alignment. And surveying, again, could be a great thing. If you've got a big organization with a thousand people, clearly, you're not going to be able to get out to all of them and ask that question. But surveying could be a wonderful thing. And then, you want to have actions. You want to have clear-cut actions and mileposts. And actions have to be actionable. So, they need to be clear, and you need to have things like, okay, timeline, budget, etc. So, you've got to make these actions clear enough and give them the resources they need so that people can actually execute the actions.

The third thing is you've got to have debate. Before Dennis retired, boy, did we have some debates. And even now, though, just because I say something doesn't make it go in our organization. We have a lot of intellectual firepower here, and it's great that we get different perspectives on different ideas. So, think about what are your market realities. Not possibilities, maybe, but realities. What are the realities in your market? What are your real organizational capabilities? What are you really, really, really good at? And what are you doing now that maybe you're not so good at, maybe even something you consider reducing or eliminating altogether? What obstacles or barriers are going to prevent you? Let's say that you say, "Hey, this is the market reality. This is our capability. We're going to do X." Okay, now, what are the barriers that are going to potentially prevent you from being successful in this initiative? Allow for psychological safety in the organization, or you will not have robust debate.

Question your historical approaches. Maybe, traditionally, we've had members, lots of members over the years, go from being hard dollar bid contractors to using alternative delivery systems and being quite successful in that transition. So, just because you were successful as an organization in something in the '80s or '90s or early 2000s, doesn't mean that that historical approach is going to work for you in the next 10 years. Debate is wonderful, but after the debate, you need to come together. I experienced this in my peer group one time. We got together. We did the review of the host company. We put together our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And we came up with our short list of recommendations. And we delivered that to the owner of the company, to my peer, and that was that. And then one of the peers went off on a tangent that was very different from what we had all just agreed on.

And I was very upset about that because we as a group had collaborated in this room for hours and hours, and then suddenly, this one person basically says, "Yeah, that's what they think. Here's what I think." And it was the opposite of team play. Team play's big for us here. That example was the opposite of team play. So, debate, rigorous debate, heated debate, even, is okay, but once the debate is over, come together and present a unified message.

And then the fourth thing is make everything clear. Make sure you have clear goals, clear mileposts, clear accountability, clear budgets, clear resource allocation, etc., etc. Ultimately, what this whole article was about was the process is greater than the plan, and I buy that 110%.

Let me know what you think. Send me an email, [email protected]. And don't forget about Boot Camp in 2026. Contact Charlotte, and she'll give you more information.

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