Without a clear picture of where you are starting your planning from, it is likely your decisions and actions will tend to be highly reactive. As a business owner, it is only natural than when a challenge arises, you might feel the need to spring into action to try to solve it, but the flip side of having a strong bias for action is that there is a chance that you might end up trying different things, each costing time, effort and money, only to realize in the end that the situation needed something entirely different from what you started with.

How do you overcome this potential pitfall? Or better yet, how do you prevent it from happening in the first place? The answer lies in having a thorough understanding of the present situation and the operational context surrounding it.

Problem and scope definition are critical for successful outcomes. One reason for this is that this definition helps to remove some of the overwhelming complexities of the situation. Another is that it also helps to find the patterns that make it similar to other situations you may have encountered in the past, so you can draw parallels and further narrow down your options.

To get a comprehensive view of the Present Situation phase, you will explore four key categories that together simplify the complexity of the current state and help you get a better understanding of where you are launching your next steps from.

• Company – What are we doing?
• Customers – What do they want?
• Context – What is happening?
• Competitors – What are they doing?

Each of these steps entails a deep dive into multiple sub-elements so that you can get a clear picture of how each of them interacts, influences, or is influenced by your strategic challenge in pursuit of growth. This phase is the main source of clarity.

With a clear grasp on the complexities of the Present Situation in which your business is in, you will proceed to generate choices by shifting your thinking into potential solutions. This is where you stop studying and analysing the problem and shift to figuring out options to solve it.

This is why this phase is called Lasting Success. Your decisions here will have an impact on the evolution of your business, as each of these possibilities will have very different assumptions, action steps, requirements from you, levels of investment, etc.; and will likely take the business in slightly or radically different trajectories depending on your choices.

This is the heart of the P.L.A.N. Framework, as it provides a comprehensive and systematic approach for you to assess viable options, define clear selection criteria, and identify the path that will maximize your chances of success. In this phase you will explore:

• Potential solutions to solve your strategic challenge.
• Implications of those solutions across the 4Cs.
• Conditions, assumptions, and barriers for implementation.
• Experiments to increase your likelihood of success.

By engaging in this phase, you have shifted from reacting blindly to your situation. Now, you have increased your confidence in the next steps by actively evaluating and choosing actions based on a clearer understanding of your business’ ability to handle the challenge and its complexity.

As you begin to go down the road of a potential option and the journey of transformation begins for your business, you will need to set up clear and cohesive Advising Guidelines to help you and your team navigate the challenges ahead and stay true to the new course of action. This refers to all the processes, systems, resources, and priorities needed to effectively implement the new strategy.

Your advising guidelines will not add value unless they support the execution of your strategic choices defined in the Lasting Success phase in a coherent and mutually reinforcing way. This is where you ask yourself questions about what needs to stop, start, increase, or decrease from the lenses of processes, systems, and policies, to name a few.

Identifying the activities that reinforce the required capabilities to achieve your competitive advantage allows you to focus your resources, time, and attention to the things that will produce a meaningful impact. This means you will craft guidelines that can be deployed in the business and help you scale up your impact without having to guide your team in every instance.

Some of the elements you will explore in this phase relate to identifying changes to:

• Capabilities and systems – What do we need?
• Standard operating procedures – What will we do differently?
• Business structure – How will we organize ourselves to deliver on the new strategy?
• Metrics – How will we define, measure, and track success?

A well-defined set of advising guidelines, much like an operational manual, will help your business run itself and allow you to spend more time doing the thinking instead of the doing.

All the planning in the world is useless unless you put it into action, learn from it, and continue to iterate your approach. The benefit of having an action-based plan that is based on your own outputs from the previous three phases is that you don’t have to rely on external triggers to initiate your actions; instead, your plan triggers your actions.

It is unlikely you will obtain drastically different results unless you are willing to change how you currently allocate your time and what you choose to prioritize. To get different results, you will have to do things differently and do different things. This phase is about defining what those are and creating a plan of action to execute your choice from the Lasting Success phase and make all the required changes identified by your Advising Guidelines.

This is not about long-term goals that are hard to track or provide either too little feedback or too late in the future. This is about defining ownership, timeframes, and measurements. This is about taking immediate action in the present to change your future. This is about control. You are in charge of what needs to get done.