On 1 July, Q5 starts

(or, Hack your org’s rhythm part 2)

I wrote previously about hacking your organisation’s rhythm. But here I want to talk about the biggest beat of all — the financial year.

It holds such a grip on us. Just like we all believe specific pictures on round pieces of metal and oblong bits of plastic hold value, we all behave like the financial year is real. But it’s not. I’m in favour of a clear pens-down moment; it’s important to step back and reflect. But how we orient our organisations around midnight on 30 June has negative impacts too.

Q4 hangover

Stuff just didn’t get finished (because planning is imperfect, and the road was bumpy). But it must. So there’re team members still busy with “last year’s work.”

Tasks that only start 1 July

Staff appraisals. Finance closing the previous year and preparing for audit. Communication of this year’s plan. Cascading new forward job plans. I’ve been in places where the Board set the CEO’s KPIs at the July meeting, Exec get theirs in August and so on; staff don’t really know what they’re working on until September. Which is kinda OK, because they’re still recovering from Q4 hangover, but demotivating.

Projects and Operations don’t stop

We build ambitious plans for projects to start on July first. The board will approve the project budget, and then we begin. 12 months of work, completion date 30 June. We can’t start on time (for all the reasons above) so we have a year’s project in less than a year.

A low mood can permeate

For many people, it feels like we’re already failing because we can’t get going. For others, rushing to do all the year-close tasks for finance and audit is a stressor. To there’s a patchy incoherence. Reporting upwards on why Q4 didn’t finish cleanly doesn’t help.

And there’s a holiday

The winter school holiday straddles the boundary. So the hard-earned holidays create even more challenges for a clean start.

A too-frequent story of delay and stress

What to do this year

Let Q5 exist

Call it for what it is. last year has a Q5, and it runs until it’s all finished. Be explicit: List all the tasks for ‘Closing out last FYr activities’ on the team’s whiteboard.

Adjust management monitoring (and Board reporting) to call out Q5 activities separately to the Q1 you’re actually in. This makes it explicit : no-one’s failing at finishing, or at starting the current year, they’re just doing the necessary work of Q5! It acts as a corrective to the clean slate mentality that causes the stress of ‘failing to finish’

Remember that HBR article saying we should aim to work at 85% capacity? Call this part of the 15% and accept a bit of drift in some places. Anyone striding around on 1 July gleefully ‘getting going’ needs to stop. Take a breath, leaders, and say:

• Let’s take a beat and reflect on last year before we rush into this one
• We’ll get going when[KPIs, New cost codes] are ready. Till then, let’s prep what we can and not stress about what we can’t do.
• Remember we had this messy start last year — but look what we got done anyway. Well done, you!

Re-plan projects: delete July 1 start dates

All project leaders; quietly rebaseline everything for a 1 August start. While you’re at it, plan for nothing being done in December-January. Delivering a 9 month project in the year will get more done that failing to deliver a 12 month program.

How to fix it next year

Let Q -1 and Q5 exist

Explicitly make April/May/June prep time for Q1. I don’t mean writing a line in the Business Plan. I mean getting projects planned and ready, whether or not they are approved by the Board for next year or not. Planning 7 project properly (assessing people, cost, time etc) leads to better proposals go to the Board, and means that the 5 that get approved are actually ready to roll.

• Q -1 is planning and readiness — who, what and where for the coming year. Getting procurement and recruitment ready. Getting the appraisal templates pre-filled…
• Q5 is the finance close, the stragglers of last year, the annual report. And a staff party :)

A different thought model for planning the year

Plan to do less, rather than fail into doing less

There is oodles of evidence that people don’t perform better under pressure at work. Relax the objectives, and build a healthy culture of striving to exceed, rather than set the bar too high and leave everyone failing.

Change how you do strategy and planning

Strategy shouldn’t be timebound. Don’t get hung up on that; you’re working our how you’ll add value to the world and mile-stoning that is unhelpful.

Business Plans, however (and any interstitial phase of “Strategic Planning”) are time bound but they aren’t carved in stone. Stop writing business plans then holding a BusinessPlanFinal.doc (with appendix KPIsFinal.xls) attitude. As i wrote in Business Planning on a Page, think kanban-style flexibility, and plan to flex activities in year.

Treat things going faster or slower as a feature, not a bug. As a leadership team, don’t work off a plan and instead work off a must / should / could list. Remember KPIs are indicators of how things are going, not sticks to beat yourself with.

You have teams already working like this. Find out who is habituated to kanban methods (just ask, who uses trello?) and have them build your business plan in trello and train your executive to use it live. Build a culture of acceleration and deceleration.

There are things that can’t flex. The AGM. The big tender process on which next year depends. The opening date tied to an anniversary. That’s OK — make them the big rocks. They’re the planets about which everything else orbits.

Plan your Q5

Call out that the year after this plan, there’ll be some blocks of activity that will happen during July-Sept. Build a year-on year-narrative that this is normal. Set it out — if you’re in doubt, your staff can give you a big, big list.

Bring the Board with you. They don’t like this pattern activity either, but if no-one’s articulating the issue and the solutions to them, it’s going to continue.

Conclusion

Executives and all involved in strategy and planning need to reconceptualise how they think of the year.

• Start with what people will do to achieve what result’, and then build a flexible plan in a kanban style.
• Socialise that straggler (Q5) and advance (Q -1) activities are normal and indeed welcome. Reduce Q1 and Q4 expectations accordingly.
• Drive performance through culture, not through planning and KPIs. A safe, supported, skilled and motivated staff will get more done than a staff who feel they’re always behind and getting it in the neck.

Changing the system is the work of the leader

It is not enough to operate within the box of the standard systems. To better enable a healthy and productive organisation, and get the good stuff done, the system needs constant reinvention.

Leadership work involves creating space to do this. And thinking about time and rhythm in orgnisations is sorely under-cooked. Aligning the system in space and time, so activities of people can deliver the strategy, is all that ever puts purpose into practice.