Indispensable Planning

If your planning works, why are the results so disappointing? Most of what you know about planning is wrong. Symptoms: ↳ No long-term growth ↳ Mistaking “having a plan” as the purpose of planning ↳ Obsessing over “hitting the plan”—as if shareholders care ↳ Cutting marketing (again) to “hit the plan” ↳ Believing planning only works in stable environments ↳ Believing planning kills agility ↳ Believing budgets make good targets ↳ Failed planning transformations—little to show ↳ Misaligned functions working in silos ↳ Quarter-end forecast vs. actual blame games ↳ Complaining “the numbers keep changing” ↳ Finance and Supply both forecasting demand ↳ Planning owned by a planning team, not business leaders ↳ Planning separate from performance management ↳ 100-page decks from the annual “strategic planning” ↳ Struggling with "strategy" or “execution” “A good deal of the corporate planning I have observed is like a ritual rain dance; it has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. Much of the advice and instruction related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.” — Russell Ackoff If the dance isn’t working, the answer isn’t to dance harder. It’s to change the approach entirely. This page offers a real way out of the theatre. Grounded in first principles, systems thinking, and a synthesis of what billion-dollar CEOs, top academics, consultants, and practitioners have tried, failed, and learned—pressure-tested across 30,000 hours inside successful global companies. Not advice. Not another acronym. Better thinking. Better odds.