Business Planning: everything we’re doing, on one page
Business Plans suck. I have complained about them my whole career. Now I’m the CEO, can i do better?
The weight
The shortest Business Plan (BP) i’d ever seen ran to about 15 pages. It pre-ambled with strategy / brand / vision, and then had ‘strands’ under which there were lengthy dot points of things that would happen. So there’s be something like ‘Collection Care’ and then there’d be dot points with abstracted one-sentence project descriptions: Catalogue the blahblah bequest for example.
This sat under the founding Statutory Instrument, and some sort of three-five year strategy. Alongside, in a different document, sat some KPIs. These KPIs were never tied back to the Business Plan. So that’s a lot of paper. What did it achieve?
The irrelevance
Almost all of a BP is expressing Shiny New Things. But most of what an organisation does isn’t shiny and new, it’s the same as last year. Open the doors. Sell products. Support customers. Clean the floors. So they never go in the document. Cue demotivated staff, switching off from something they can’t see themselves in.
The infinitesimal audience
I don’t know if anyone outside the CEO and governance team ever reads these huge Business Plans. A manager might paste the dot points into a department plan (another whopper!) or a forward job plan. But the full doc? No, it’s irrelevant. As a senior manager, I would read it once a quarter, when the Governance person me asked to. When I was more junior, I never remember reading it more than once and I certainly didn’t retain anything from it.
The futility
BPs have no power in effecting change. They are routinely ignored (‘I know my job’) and even when referred to simply result in arguments about ‘who’s dot point is the Greatest Avenger’.
Project Plans, Ministerial directions, Board whims, project funding would appear and suddenly become the driving force, while the BP was never consulted or revised in line with these changes. At the end of the year? If reports were written, they never looked at Plan vs Actual, just a version of these two responses:
- Done
- Not done because of [whims, funding, etc…]
Meanwhile. The real and only power lies in the budget documents, and in the day-to-day execution of influence and power by a person’s immediate boss.
The tedium
And so we go round again. Last year’s BP becomes a template, and the dot points get updated. Cue much consultation and chit-chat to hone adjectives (will we be engaging? or inspiring?). Someone in Finance updates the KPIs in a spreadsheet no-one else reads and oh yes here we are again. So the cycle of disengagement continues.
But could i do better?
Five months in as CEO, in the middle of COVID-volatility, my first Business Plan at Renew was pretty traditional. A document of maybe 12 pages, with an attempt to bring in some dates and targets. It didn’t really align closely with the budget. And guess what? No-one really looked at it. Everything pertinent was known in other ways — the budget, the projects already running, the social connectivity of clever people who knew what to do.
So at the end of my first full year, I planned a better approach. I wanted the Plan to:
- Represent all staff’s activity — ongoing work and new projects
- Embed prioritisation
- Explicitly encourage change through the year
- Be short
- Be back to back with budget and staffing levels
- Be built with all staff and board engaged
What did I do?
I had the path fully mapped out it out in my head about three months before the deadline (June). We already have a good Constitution and 2025 Strategy. I knew there’d be a budget, which would carry deep embedded decisions (such as staffing levels, income targets). I wanted to do some proper work on our staff skills, structure, succession planning and so on (the awfully titled practice of Workforce Planning). Anyway, here’s my little note-to-self sketch.
Three activities happened through March-May
- Budget build: we took 3-year rolling averages, mapped out a three year plan and then adjusted for knowns. For example, we knew what our accommodation costs would be. I did this with accountants and the Finance committee of the Board
- Strategy and new ideas: I took all the ideas from staff, volunteers and Board members and used a lean priority matrix to pick the ones we’d kick into the BP processes
- Staff planning: Working with our managers and some Board members to come up with a plan
So because I had done all this, I knew that the eventual June documentation — with its important and very formal Board Approval Moment — would have three key qualities:
- No surprises
- Money / Activity / Resources / Purpose would all be expressed and be back-to-back aligned with each other, in the format most appropriate
- It would contain the seeds of its own growth and change; a living document rather than a static paperweight
What happened in the Drafting and Consulting loop?
First of all, there were lots of little conversations, not too much structure. Keeping little lists for myself. And I was thinking ‘how do i really want to do this?’ and the answer was ‘with everyone, iteratively, on a whiteboard’. Not knowing if lockdowns would permit that in person, i mapped out a structure in miro:
Then I could fill it in with all the stuff we have to do, the stuff we really want to do in the year, and all the ideas for new projects.
I want to explain this a little. First, there is a home for everything: everything we do or want to do can fit into one of the boxes. Secondly, if you read from left to right it runs from concrete/obligatory to speculative. I am not worried about capturing the budget or people stuff in here — there’ll sort themselves out through either a big ol’ established process (the money stuff) or through the conversations (my staff know their capacity).
But this makes visual rule, and enables a future process: no moving stuff into the green/red boxes UNLESS there’s more money/resources. Don’t just throw a laundry list at the team and expect them to run at everything. Start at the left. If you can, pick up something to the right. Does a group with authority (eg a Board member, me) want to priorities a thing on the right? Sure, that’s very possible. Just need to decide what’s going to be cancelled of the things on the left to make space. Can’t cancel anything? OK, well, we don’t have capacity for it.
So then i began to populate the BP template. And then we had some all-staff and management workshops around it. Honestly, in the fuzz of lockdown i can’t quite remember who / how / when i did that. I think small groups, online? Through that process, we realised some things were missing. I needed to record Board-driven projects, because they do use organisational resources, so need to be captured. I also wanted to capture areas staff had identified for capacity building — things we knew we would need to get involved with in future, but didn’t yet have the breadth AND strength to do so in our team.
Quite late in the day, maybe May, I realised there was something missing and that was a tool with an axis of time. So we had an all-staff workshop and made this — which I have redacted for the organisation info but it’s pretty obvious what would be in it:
What really worked was this specificity engaged people who liked detail, liked things to be grounded in reality. I default towards the big picture and conceptual, so this was a really helpful thing for me to (re-)realise
Anyway, I ended up taking to the Board meeting in June
- some purpose/execution intellectual models (that needs to be another post…)
- A budget
- a calendar of the next six months of work
- And the Business Plan on a Page.
And so here it is, the thing i’m still so pleased with that I’ve written all this blurb about it. Our Business Plan, Visually on one page, without any backup or supplementary documents:
All up, it was probably about 2 weeks of work from me, spread over 3 months, and staff were engaged for about 1–2 hours each on average. That’s pretty efficient. And at the Board meeting, it was simple and clear for the Board to discuss and approve.
How do I plan to apply this? First, have reviews at least once a quarter with staff. We can see how we are going, we can assess new opportunities against what we already have on the slate. This sits with all the other systems of staff plans, budget reviews and so on, of course. Reviewing the BP is the ‘next layer up’, which we’ll come to less frequently.
Second, use it for reflection next year when we build the next year’s Business Plan. How are we going, and should we do it like this again.
I don’t want to assume the results of that reflection, but I am pretty confident there won’t be a clamour to reintroduce the fifteen-pages of 11/13pt verbiage.
The caveat is of course that we are a $2.5M-ish NFP with about 15FTE staff. My freedom to act was rather less constrained than when i was a manager in a large museum.
I hope that’s been useful for someone, somewhere. And if you see I have committed an egregious failure of CEO-ing, do please drop me a line and let me know…
