Seven Qualities of a Good Plan
If you want to get something done, it helps to have a plan. And if you want to get it done right, it helps to have a good one.
Introduction
“Proper planning prevents piss poor performance.” — The British Army.
Look — you probably don’t need a plan for everything in life. And there are good reasons not to make one for every…..little…thing.
But sometimes you need a plan and it needs to be a plan you can carry out.
It all depends on complexity, situation, and what you need the plan for.
My work has always been dominated by planning and carrying out plans. The plans I’ve made — disaster management, crisis, security, operational, and contingency plans for various emergency and development organizations all over the world, are certainly a step above in complexity from most personal stuff and a step or two below planning for something as complex as a war or three or four steps below planning for something as far-reaching as climate change.
That being said it has been my experience there are certain qualities a plan needs to make it good and worthwhile. The following are mine. If you’re looking for others [though they have a lot in common], try here and here.
Example: Contingency Plan for an Aid Organization
In order to layout the qualities of a good plan, one needs an example, fortunately, I have a lot of experience to draw on for you. The example here is the creation of a contingency plan for an aid organization that operates in a low-intensity conflict zone [not all-out war, but still conflict]. A contingency plan is a plan that covers what to do if certain bad things happen.
That can pretty much be applied to anything in society these days [or most days].
This example is generalized for the sake of the post and will include other examples as we go along. Mostly it’s just useful to put the qualities of a good plan in context.
Seven Qualities of a Good Plan
Have Clear Goals
Plans are in service of your strategy which in turn are in service of your objectives. Be as clear as possible about your objectives.
In the contingency plan example, the primary goal is simple — keep everyone safe. Second, you want to deliver humanitarian programming in an insecure environment. So, you have a primary goal [safety] that would win out if the two goals were set against each other — but as long as you can do both — you do both.
Now it is important to note here, in order to understand what is an acceptable risk in this environment [both to stay in the environment and to do programming] you have to establish a risk threshold. The risk threshold was how much risk you would accept in order to be in and do programming in the environment. If you cross that line, then you will know you can no longer keep people safe in that environment and/or do normal operations in that environment.
In this case, our risk threshold acts as a limit or check on our goals. An unconstrained goal [i.e. make profits at all costs — even the planet] is not usually healthy or sustainable.
Have Clear Strategy
Be clear about your strategy. So, if the above [keep everyone safe] is the ultimate objective — what is the strategy to achieve that?
I follow my own simple rule of humanitarian security. “If we’re not there when bad shit happens then bad shit doesn’t happen to us”. It is a simple strategy on its face but slightly more complex when you understand it.
It means you do all your work right up until the point where you think the risk will exceed your risk threshold. You have to understand when that is likely to happen and then get out of Dodge. That way you won’t be there when the bad stuff happens.
Simple to say, more complex to do.
Have coherent actions to enact your strategy
You start with a goal, then you have a strategy to achieve that goal. Then you make a plan, which is a set of coherent actions, in order to carry out the strategy. In this case, in order to not be there when bad shit happens, you need to do a couple of things:
First, everyone needs to understand what your risk threshold is. Then you need to understand what the triggers are of where the risk would cross that threshold. For example, if you have credible reports of an impending armed attack — that’s an obvious trigger.
Second, you need to know what is going to happen and when. You need information networks in order to know what’s going on. You need to know who to talk to, what information is valid, how you get the info, and how to make decisions based on the info.
Finally, you need to know how to move and where to move too. Where is your nearest safe point? How do you get there? By foot? Vehicle? Chopper? Or do you have the ability to develop options? Hopefully, you always have the ability to develop options.
This brings me to the next point…..
Make sure your plan is flexible
Plans should be flexible and give you options based on your likely scenarios. In the current scenario, your options could consist of multiple fallback points and multiple modes of travel.
Let me give a less urgent example [though only slightly]. Say you have a plan to quit smoking. It states that every time you want a cigarette, you go for a walk. Not good. What if it’s cold and you don’t feel like being out in the cold? How about if you’re around people and you can’t leave to go for a walk? Or if you’re this or that?
Good plans usually have options — enough options to be flexible but not so many that they’ll drown you in choice.
Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. True, but in a good plan you’ve got all the options to respond with depending on how you got hit [if you can get yourself to respond after getting hit — a different problem].
Make sure your plan is simple
The plan should be as simple as possible — and deal with the needed complexity in order to achieve your aims. Keep it simple stupid. Yet if it’s so simple it doesn’t address what you need to address, then it’s not worthwhile either. The trick is, understand the complexity of what you’re trying to do, figure out what’s most important, address it, and strip the rest.
In the security example — the plan that this example draws from, boiled down to — if we had enough rumors of a potential impending attack — we’d go across the border and work from a safe house we had set up on that side.
It’s simple. And we addressed the complexity we had to. We needed documentation to cross the border. Some staff would stay because they were local and they were staying with their families. The duty of care for the organization differed depending on where someone was hired. We had to address the quality of information and what the triggers for movement were. We had to address the potential misuse of the safe house. Yet once all that was done, in the preparatory phase — it’s fairly simple to understand and to carry out.
Remember you can have a plan to go to the store and a plan to mitigate the state of California against raging wildfires — one is obviously more complex than the other but neither should be more complex than it needs to be to achieve your specific aims.
Make sure you create your plan in an inclusive manner
The creation of a plan should include all the stakeholders [or at least representatives of all the stakeholders]. You could never make an evacuation plan without including the people who have to evacuate or the people who facilitate the evacuation plan.
You shouldn’t make a plan for your family — without your family.
I could make a plan to quit smoking by myself — but even then — it will be more successful if I have help.
It is a simple concept, yet one we don’t always follow through on.
Diversity of opinion and experience and working through disagreements constructively — will create better decisions and a better plan. Are there times when two people just need to go into a room and knock out a plan for the larger group? Definitely, but, consultation should have already been done. Inclusivity will not only make a better plan, but it will also make it more likely that the people can and will carry the plan out when the time comes.
Make sure your plan is implementable
And that’s the final thing. You have to be able to actually do your plan. If you can’t do it, then it sucks. I’ve had this happen to me before. I thought I wrote the Shakespeare of plans but we couldn’t do it. So my plan sucked.
A lot of that suckiness came from failure to do one of the other six things on this list. We made a plan that was too complex. Or a plan that was made in a vacuum. Maybe it wasn’t flexible. Or, maybe, it just wasn’t realistic.
And if your plan isn’t realistic, it’s not going to be implementable.
Conclusion
The plan needs to be implementable, simple, flexible, inclusive, clear, and have compound power [the connection from your overarching goal to your strategy to your plan].
Start with your strategic goals, craft a strategy to achieve those goals and overcome obstacles, create a plan of clear actions to enact that strategy, keep it flexible and keep it simple as possible while addressing needed complexity, make sure everyone is involved in the plan creation and make sure you can carry it out.
Those are the foundations — then the trick becomes scaling up or down based on the complexity of what you are doing.
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