What’s the most important question to ask yourself every day?
Planning is guessing: This is the fifth post in the series of The Ten Priorities: Laying the Foundations for a Great Business and Life. The fifth Priority is about Planning. The introduction to this series on The Ten Priorities is here.
Planning and guessing, as seen on Kochie’s Business Builders
Nothing of value was ever achieved by humans without a plan.
This is fact
Yet planning is guessing, right? (great article from Signal v Noise about planning and guessing here) Nobody can know what tomorrow is actually going to look like, all we can do is guess.
That’s planning: We’re at point A, and we want to get to point B by date X. There are many routes to point B, so knowing what we know about today and given what we expect the world to look like tomorrow, what do we guess is the best route to get to point B by date X?
Tomorrow the world changes
But tomorrow the world is a different place. Tomorrow it might snow along the route we’d planned to take to point B, and we must change the route.
That’s the secret about planning: Planning is something we must do again every day. When realities change, we must change our plans right along with them. (more about Planning here).
The most effective leaders have already thought about the possibility of snow along the chosen route, long before the snow actually appears, and they’ve already worked out how to change the route to point B in that eventuality.
Business owners who build great businesses, constantly ask themselves:
What if?
They ask themselves: “We’ve got a plan, based on certain assumptions… But… What if… any one of those assumptions turns out to be wrong, what do we do instead?”
When you learn to ask, “What if?”, all the time, you’ll respond quickly and appropriately to the changing realities and keep your business moving forward… I promise you.
Goal setting, Planning and the 7 Big Questions of Small Business
Business owners frequently ask 7 Big Questions about how to Build a Beautiful Business and Life.
The first of these Big Questions is: How do I grow my business?
To answer that question I have identified the 11 most important strategies to create Business Growth.
The second of these strategies is Grow your business with Goals. The sixth of those strategies is Grow your business with Planning. This article explains how Goal setting, Planning and Growth hang together, in some depth.