Basic Planning (#106)
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
General Dwight Eisenhower
General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was a military planner. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 he served as the head of the Army’s War Plans Division and built the war plans to defeat Germany and Japan. He was so talented as a planner he was selected to lead Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, and, eventually, Operation Overlord, the invasion of France. Despite the months of planning for establishing the beachhead in Normandy, Ike knew the invasion would not go as planned. In his letter to the troops prior to the operation, he told them, “Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely… I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!” Eisenhower, of course, went on to lead the Allies’ victory in Europe, as well as serve two terms as President of the United States. Not bad for a military planner.
Planning in the military, business, non-profits, and other environments has gotten a bad reputation. Unforeseen events derail the most carefully laid plans. Organizations struggle to accomplish the tasks laid out in the plans. Annual planning cycles fail to anticipate trends or fail to change the plan significantly year-in and year-out. Plans default to the production of budgets and financial forecasts. A recent survey of executives confirmed the disappointment in planning: only 45 percent were satisfied with their planning process and only 23 percent thought key decisions were made during it.
Yet for the vast number of organizations, the annual planning process plays an essential role. In addition to building some elements of a company’s strategy, the process results in a budget, allocates resources for the coming 12 to 18 months, sets financial and operating goals, and aligns leadership on the organization’s strategic priorities. Although many decisions are made outside the planning process, having the planning framework enables leaders to deviate from the plan, seize opportunities, and avoid miscalculations. Planning, at its essence, is setting priorities, deciding on what not to do (one of the hardest parts), and building contingencies for a year that looks different than the last year. Having a planning process and a format to convey the plan are the first steps in planning, developing a roadmap for your team, and increasing your organization’s grit.
Planning Process
If you are a leader in a small or medium sized organization, a sports team, or a non-profit, you may not have a standardized planning process yet. Establishing and implementing an effective and repeatable planning process is vital to the success of any team since it enables everyone in the enterprise to think through the problem and apply the assets of the organization towards solving the problem, while using the same formats and terminology. The military has this with the Troop Leading Procedures (TLPs) for small units and the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP) for large units.
For the past seven decades, the U.S. Army’s Ranger School taught and still continues to teach the Troop Leading Procedures and the Operations Order (OPORD) format as a way to convey plans to a small group. The process and the OPORD format were something continuously drilled into my brain as I struggled through the mountains of North Georgia and the swamps of Florida in 1994; but the dozens of repetitions paid off – the process and format were indoctrinated into me. Throughout my career I used the planning process and OPORD format to provide a plan to my platoon during the aborted airborne invasion of Haiti in 1994, a German tank unit in Bosnia in 2002, repeatedly to a battalion in combat in eastern Baghdad in 2005, repeatedly to a brigade in counterinsurgency operations in the suburbs of Baghdad in 2007 and 2008, and regularly to my battalion in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011.
For a variety of reasons, the military planning process is an imperfect fit for other environments. However, modifying the military’s planning process to fit your business, non-profit, or team can be a great start point for establishing a standardized way to think through problems both long and short-term. As General George S. Patton once said, “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
Planning Checklist
A checklist for an organizational planning process to develop a good plan, right now, might look like this:
[Leader and the Team] Analyze the problem, the mission, the task, or annual plan
Facts and Assumptions (Basic facts and assumptions about the organization and environment)
The Market (What’s your market outlook? What assumptions are you building the plan upon?)
The Customer (What’s your customer doing?)
The Competition (Who’s your competition? What are they doing?)
Coronavirus (Current situation on travel, workplace, etc?)
Corporate (What are they doing? What’s their mission?)
Resources (What is your budget? How many people do you have available?
Historic (What did you do last year? What worked? What didn’t work?)
[Leader and the Team] Develop a course of action (broad guidelines) to solve the problem, accomplish the mission, complete the task, or drive your organization during the year
Outline key things to accomplish
Outline key limitations
[Leader] Develop your Mission+Leader’s Intent (See post #25 for how to develop a Leader’s Intent)
[Team] Empower your team to develop the plan by providing planning guidance (i.e. What key elements do you want to see in the plan? Use the work developing the course of action and Mission+Leader’s Intent as guidance.)
[Team with Leader’s Input] Develop, refine and synchronize the plan
Empower your team to develop portions or the entire plan
Ensure you have thought through all aspects of the business or non-profit, given them tasks to accomplish, and synchronized those tasks
Think through HR, Accounting, Sales, Marketing, Operations, IT, etc.
Develop contingency plans for 1-2 critical contingencies
[Team] Write the plan
The military develops written plans so when people are tired or under stress they have a written document to reference.
[Leader and the Team] Brief the plan
[Leader] Emphasize your Mission+Leader’s Intent
[Team] Ensure that the key leaders Back Brief their portion of the plan to ensure that everyone understands (See post #24 for the Back Brief )
[Leader] Supervise preparation for, rehearsals of, and execution of the plan
[Leader and the Team] Conduct an After-Action Review of the planning and execution (See post #41 for more on the AAR). Analyze lessons learned and implement them in the next planning process.
Communicating the Plan -- the Operations Order
The Operations Order (OPORD) is a standard format for conveying information for a military plan. It consists of five paragraphs — Situation, Mission, Execution, Service and Support (or Admin and Logistics by the U.S. Marine Corps), and Command and Control. Most people don’t know that the Army’s standard format for an Operations Order was developed by Frederick Garman in 1957 when he was assigned to Fort Benning's Ranger Department (the predecessor of today’s U.S. Army Ranger School.) The Army quickly adopted it and it has been used in every conflict since the Vietnam War. Talk about an idea going viral!
In Afghanistan, the unit I was part of used the OPORD to convey yearlong campaign plans, as well as short duration missions. Using the same format for a plan enabled everyone to know where to listen for the information they needed if they were receiving it orally or look for the information if they had a written copy. More importantly, using the OPORD format forced us to think through all the elements of the plan.
This OPORD format nests well with the planning process discussed earlier. Every department in a business can use both of them to support their future planning. Whether you are the leader of a human resources department, the sales team, marketing, or production, using a similar format can ensure that your plans are aligned, synchronized, and nested with the rest of your teams.
Utilizing a corporate OPORD format will help you build a better plan for your team. Keeping the OPORD to 1-2 pages provides your corporate team enough of a framework, ensures that the team actually reads the document, and enables your people to retain their agility. I modified the military format to better fit a corporate environment. For those of you familiar with the military OPORD, I combined Paragraph 4, Logistics, and Paragraph 5, Command and Control, into one Paragraph 4, entitled Admin, Logistics, and Communications. Feel free to optimize this format so it fits your unique situation.
Corporate Operation Order Format
1. Situation:
The Market (What’s your market outlook? What assumptions are you building the plan upon?)
The Customer (What’s your customer doing?)
The Competition (Who’s your competition? What are they doing?)
Higher (What are they doing? What’s their mission?)
2. Mission: (Who, What, When, Where, Why)
3. Execution:
Leader’s Intent
Purpose (A broader why then the one used in the mission statement. Enables decisions in your absence)
Key Tasks (The How)
End State (What does success look like on December 31?)
Major Events by Month (think about for the executive group, HR, IT, marketing, sales, and operations)
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Conduct After Action Review
Build annual plan for next year
Key Tasks for different portions of the business to accomplish:
Operations
Marketing
Sales
HR
IT
Accounting and Finance
4. Admin, Logistics, and Communications
Administrative Issues/Tasks
Logistics to support the plan
Communications:
To the shareholders/board
To the market
To the company
This format is used today by leaders in real estate, healthcare, agribusiness, and the petroleum industry.
Obstacle
One of the biggest obstacles with plans are that most are too complex. Their complexity leads to them being overcome by events and not being very useful as the team executes the plan in a steadily evolving environment. Then, your team doesn’t put a lot of effort into the planning since they don’t see a return on the investment. Keep your plans simple so that they retain flexibility as the environment changes. Remember, if Ike’s plan for the invasion of Europe was only 5 pages in length, yours can be that short or shorter.
Conclusion
Your organization is most likely not planning anything on the scale of the invasion of Europe in 1944 but utilizing a planning process can give your organization the framework to deal with chaos, seize opportunities, and improvise. In addition, like General Eisenhower commented, the work done thinking through contingencies for both a crisis and a success is “indispensable.” Use a standard planning process and the OPORD format to get your team to better understand the goals and the roadmap you will follow, as well as enhance its organizational grit.