7 Critical Steps to Plan for Success in 2024
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” – Mike Tyson.
Maybe the last time you made a plan you ended up feeling like you just took one on the chin. I’ve been there.
There are endless examples and quotes on the importance of planning for success. Most people inherently know they need to plan for success to occur, but they may be unsure how to plan for success, or even what elements of their plan will ultimately achieve success.
Even Mike Tyson knew that simply having a plan was no guarantee for success demonstrated by his infamous quote, and a remarkably accurate rephrasing of the popular military planner quote “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” itself a modern paraphrasing of 19th-century military planner, Helmuth von Moltke who said, “No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main force.”
Now I just assume that Mike Tyson was not an avid reader of 19th-century military strategists, but what these great minds, both Tyson and Moltke the Elder, are highlighting is that you can’t assume your plan will guarantee success. So…
How do I create a plan for success?
Drawing from my experience as a military planner I developed a series of repeatable steps for planning that can be applied to any effort. Following these seven critical steps can put you on a path to making sure your plan has the greatest chance for success. With some practice, you can become an expert at planning anything you set your mind to.
1. Define your Goal. Plan for success with the end in mind.
The first step is to define the purpose of your plan. This can be in the form of a goal or mission statement. Depending on how broad or specific your goal or mission is will determine the complexity of your planning effort.
If you were to develop a fitness plan, you may have a goal to bench press 225 lbs or complete a triathlon that might be a relatively simple plan. But if your mission is to become a more athletic person your plan is likely far more complex but may include both intermediate objectives of benching 225 and completing a triathlon.
Plan with the end in mind. With your goal or mission statement, think about the end. Where are you and what are the conditions under which you would claim victory? Ultimately your goal or mission is the thing you will measure to determine if you were successful or not. Did I complete that triathlon? Am I a more athletic person?
What are your goals? How do you properly set goals? A common framework for setting goals is the SMART framework which stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-based
Make sure your plan fits this criteria. Setting goals or trying to plan toward a vague concept will have you spinning your wheels with little progress.
2. Understand and evaluate your environment.
This is the research part of your plan. You may know what you need to do already, or you may need to do some research. The purpose of this step is to fully understand yourself and the environment that you are operating in. A great place to start is by developing what is known as a mind map. This is also the step where you would want to complete a SWOT analysis, or strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Evaluate yourself first. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What about your team? What about your competition? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Your environment is always changing so consider new things. With AI becoming more and more ubiquitous, there may be an AI tool that can help aid your planning or execution effort that you want to be aware of.
What are the elements about yourself and your behavior that you can change? What are the elements of your environment that you can change? Does changing them move you closer to your goal? This is critical to complete before the next step as it will inform your decision-making in the future.
If you have a team, make sure to assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses to help determine task assignments later on or assess the motivations and desires of a market you are entering.
The key is to understand what actions can be taken that will result in the right changes to lead you to your goal.
I want to emphasize that this is one of the most important steps in planning and often the most overlooked. Failure to understand your environment is sure to derail any plan for success. One of the biggest reasons is that skipping this step is one of the most common reasons many problem-solving efforts fail. They try to solve the wrong problem.
3. Determine the steps and sequence. Develop intermediate goals and objectives.
Time to develop intermediate goals and objectives. How are you going to achieve your goal or complete your mission? Now that you thoroughly evaluated your environment you should have a good idea of what actions are necessary to accomplish your goal or mission. What steps are you going to take to get there? This is the core of planning. These action steps, if performed, should place you at your desired destination.
What order should they be accomplished in? Who should perform them? What are the tasks that you can perform yourself or delegate that will directly support the achievement of the desired goal or objective? Reference the SMART framework above when setting intermediate and short-term goals.
You can also develop a list of supporting tasks. Those things that can be accomplished that while they don’t directly accomplish your objective, perhaps help enable or make your primary tasks simpler. Using the fitness example, your primary tasks may be the exercises you perform but supporting tasks may be things like setting clothes out ahead of time or meal prepping.
It is important to distinguish between your Ultimate or Primary Goal or Mission, and your intermediate goals and objectives. Do your smaller goals support the achievement of your primary goal? If your primary goal is to be more athletic. Benching 225 and running a triathlon may be good intermediate goals. But if your Primary goal is to complete a Triathlon, Benching 225 may not be a good fitness goal as it doesn’t necessarily support completing a triathlon. While it may serve to make you overall a more athletic person, it does not directly support a triathlon the way swimming, running and cycling do!
Develop your timeline. It’s important to set a timeline for accomplishment. Going back to the SMART process this is the last step and is important for accountability. Not only do you need to be able to measure your progress toward your goal, it’s important to be able to assess your progress on the timeline to achieve it. Don’t forget to consider the achievable aspect of this. Don’t set a constrictive timeline so that you can’t accomplish your goal. The timeline is an accountability tool to keep you on track and measure your progress and is an important element of the SMART framework.
4. Manage Risks.
If planning is the key to success. Risk management is the key to planning. So, what are the risks? It all starts with a simple question. What could go wrong? What are the things that are going to get in the way of success? These can be elements of your environment other people, and even your behavior and habits.
Take a step back and think about your environment again. What are things that you don’t necessarily have control over that might impact your ability to perform your tasks or that might act counter to your goals? What are you going to do, when you you encounter one of these barriers? Know that your plan is unlikely to be executed without conflict. Remember Tyson and Moltke? Understanding this step is the key to staying on track when things go awry.
Risk management is an assessment of probability and severity. Now you don’t have to be a data scientist for this step, though for complex plans this can be very helpful to fully understand risk. However, for simple plans, think critically about how likely is this thing to happen and how bad will it be if it happens.
5. Write it down. Assign Tasks and Delegate.
If you haven’t already as part of a previous step, write your plan down. You can use a journal or planning tool like Monday.com for this step. If you used the SMART framework for goals, this is a good way to keep track of each goal. Make sure you record what you are measuring. How will you measure your success? In line with your goals and mission statement. Write down the key metrics you will measure to ensure you are progressing towards your goal and ultimately the final measure that will allow you to say that you have completed your goal.
What are critical deadlines and timelines that need to be met to stay on track you came up with in step 3? If you don’t have a fixed timeline set one for yourself. Don’t ignore the T in SMART and give yourself the excuse of plenty of time not to stay on track. Even if you don’t have a deadline, most successful people have already figured out that giving themselves a sense of urgency is critical to their success.
For longer-term or complex plans this may be the step where you determine the need for and hire an expert. Do you need a complex financial or tax plan for your assets? Hire a tax strategist. Need to plan a major event? Hire a specialized events planner. Need to make a serious transformational health change or want to win a sports or fitness competition? Hire a coach or Health/Fitness expert. Developing a business plan? Hire a consultant familiar with the industry you are pursuing. Consider your strengths and weaknesses. Focus your effort on your strengths. Delegate to others, or even an AI tool, which may be a weakness.
6. Take action. Communicate.
No amount of success can be manifested without preparation (the planning) and hard work (the action). Part of your planning needs to include when to take action. This is also because you never just complete a plan and then act. Part of your planning involves reviewing progress and updating your plan after an action is taken and you’ve started measuring your progress.
Additionally, you want to make sure you don’t end up in a planning loop. At some point, you need to take action. A great lesson summarized by another famous military planner is that “a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” – Gen. George S. Patton. Don’t get stuck in a planning loop. Take action!
7. Track your progress and make adjustments
How are you tracking your progress? Using your Journal or other planning tool like Monday.com, how are you going to make decisions on when to make adjustments? This is where you want to write your measurements that you will asses if you are staying on track. Build your criteria for transitioning to your next task. You also want to use this step to write down your plan for what you will do if you miss an intermediate goal or a measurement at a critical time that falls short. Don’t forget about your risks.
You may also want to consider quitting criteria. What? But this is supposed to be a plan for success! This is true, and success may be delayed. The point of quitting criteria isn’t to give you an excuse to quit. It’s to be a backup to make sure you don’t do permanent damage to something because you were too stubborn after starting your plan. Quitting before you break something may just be the thing that saves your plan in the long run before making it impossible to continue. The sunk cost fallacy can just as quickly destroy your plan as any other risk foreseen or otherwise.
Conclusion
The key to developing a plan for success is in the process of planning not the plan itself. You just need a good point to deviate from. It’s not a question of if you will deviate, it’s when. As Bobby Unser says, “Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.” The value is in the preparation. Something will happen that will throw a wrench in your plan. If you’ve followed a good planning process, you can handle it smoothly and continue on your path to success. So plan in order to be prepared, and when the opportunity presents itself, you will be ready to capitalize on any success it offers.
