Dear Leaders, I have a pondering for you this week.
Picture this, it’s January 2025 and you are planning for the next 18 months for your business.
Will 2027 look very different or will it look like a tweaked version of today.
For many, it will look a slightly different version of today.
Is this good or bad, I will let you decide…
Journey: You have survived everything 2022 threw at you, you and your business started to progress in 2023 and in 2024 you saw good growth rates and the full-time shift hybrid work feels like the best move for your business in the last five years.
Vision: This is how many of the biggest and most successful businesses operate.
They scenario plan, they are meticulous in detail and they have a vision they set out and sculpt the company towards.
They are built for the long term, they have the next three years designed in their playbook and they have teams operating on three-year cycles.
And yes, they will be re-forecasting and revisiting department budgets and realigning depending on some of the nuances happening.
Questions To Answer:
- What do 2026 and 2027 look like after this picture is painted for you?
- How are you going to plan the next 5 years?
- How are you going to design the next 3 years to put performance (strategy) and people (company culture) first?
- What is your focus metric? (The metric that focuses all other metrics in your business)
- What are your beliefs and what are your strategic bets?
- Do you have this skill set within your business?
Is there a future seer you need to bring onto the planning cycles and help you to shape and rethink how you see three to five years ahead? - How are you going to keep the teams engaged and stop them from hitting the unfollow button on the company and leadership teams?
Remember my framework:
– 💭 Think 5 years ahead,
– 🗺 Plan 3 years ahead,
-🚦 Action 1-year head.
That way you will have the right plan and focus metric, which you can review and tweak regularly rather than constantly changing in annual planning cycles and in long-range planning sessions don’t seem like a huge waste of time and resources.
This week:
- Consider how you are going to optimise your processes,
- How you are going to shape your business for your company culture (your people),
- How you will shape your product,
- How you will shape your external messaging
- And how you optimise your performance.
With 2022 likely going to be more seasonal again and operate closer to prior years, think ultra long term and book time with your leadership team to create a culture of growth mindsets, focusing on the long term while making changes more frequently and allowing this behaviour to positively influence your business.
Have a great week and whatever department you are in have 2027 in mind for your decisions, however hard and impossible it may seem.
Thanks,
Danny Denhard