What is the P.L.A.N. Framework?
The P.L.A.N. Framework is a simple four-step process that helps business leaders gain clarity, confidence, and control of their next steps towards generating growth.
This process is designed to systematically help you evaluate your operational context, design your strategy, devise guidelines to focus your efforts, and create clear execution plans to make your vision a reality.
As a result, the process gives you a cohesive plan of action that is tailored to your particular situation.
What does P.L.A.N. stand for?
P.L.A.N. stands for Present Situation, Lasting Success, Advising Guidelines, and Next Steps.
Present Situation
Start by getting a better understanding of your challenge and its current operational context.
Lasting Success
Assess viable options, define clear selection criteria, and identify the path that will maximise your chances of success.
Advising Guidelines
Define the rules to navigate challenges ahead and stay true to the new course of action.
Next Steps
All the planning in the world is useless unless you put it into action, learn from it, and iterate your approach.
Each of the four main components of the framework consists of a series of steps that guide you towards clarity, control, and confidence. Keep reading to find out more about each and how they may help you.
Present Situation
In the first step you will get a proper understanding of your current operational context. 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 realise 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. This phase is the main source of clarity.
Lasting Success
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.
And this is why this phase is called Lasting Success. Because your decisions here will have an impact on the evolution of the 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 maximise your chances of success. This phase is the main source of confidence.
Advising Guidelines
Following from your choice forward from the Lasting Success phase, 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, and continue from the lenses of processes, systems, policies, to name a few.
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. 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.
Next Steps
The final phase of the P.L.A.N. framework is all about execution. 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 prioritise. 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.
Your turn
If reading through the structure of the P.L.A.N. framework sparked a thought or idea, let’s have a chat about how I can help you refine it and implement it in your context.
Let’s P.L.A.N.
