“No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces”, so said Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder in 1871. He was indeed a wise man because more than 150 years later, we are constantly reminded of this.

That is why the military plan and train for numerous scenarios because they know that the initial plan will not survive the initial contact with the enemy. They have viable options.

Never was this more driven home for me than when I was working in the Middle East, for Coca-Cola. We had set our company revenue forecast, budgets and agreed our major initiatives as usual in September of the previous year. In August of the current year, Iraq invaded Kuwait. That changed everything.  All the business plans that we had prepared to present to key Division office personnel, that had flown in the night before the invasion, were useless. The business planning meeting planned for Aug-6 changed dramatically.

2020 was similar for most of us. As Covid-19 hit us in March and the magnitude of the pandemic became apparent, the plans we had devised suddenly became digital firewood. All our forecast and budgets assumptions went up in Microsoft smoke. How were we going to go about adjusting them and getting back on track?

Now as an aside, being a Mac guy there’s nothing I like better than a Microsoft fire.

However, not to digress, fortunately, I had worked with a lot of our clients to start scenario planning when Covid first hit.

Not only had we got scenario planning in place with alternate plans, but we had put these together with an overall operational framework.

Using this framework, we were able to adjust and change direction with the speed necessary. However, without that framework many of my clients would have either:

Procrastinated because they did not want to start all over and therefore hoped their way out of the problem or they would have spent months reinventing themselves.

With the framework, we established we could make tweaks and changes without a complete overhaul of the system.

Imagine one morning you go out to the car and you have problems starting it. If you know anything vaguely about a car, (and I don’t) you know that spark plugs provide the ignition to start as well as maintain power.

Rather than take out the complete engine (or take it to the garage and ask them to do that), you will most likely check the various spark plugs for dirt and wear and replace them where necessary. So it’s the same with an efficient leadership operating system. You just change the things that need changing rather than the whole system. So freedom within a framework.

It is rarely too late to adjust your plans. Quarterly sessions with a fixed agenda and flexibility built in for discussion to resolve the key issues allow for flexibility. The key is the framework to start with, much like ensuring you have a sound foundation for a building before you build the floors on top.

Good plans and good teams constantly evolve to suit the circumstances required, because things DO change. But, making it up as you go along rarely turns out well. We need a framework and agreement on a plan that allows us to make changes and be nimble in doing so.

 

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash