George: Let's do this.
Camille: It's you and me George talking about planning. Not for the first time. Not for the last time.
Camille: I'd never thought that I would be able to turn something that I enjoy so much: like planning into a whole podcast conversation. How great is that?
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores what you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it.
Camille: So the premise today is that planning is a problem solving tool and that planning is the work. Because as a business owner or a leader in business, your job is pretty much problem solving all the time.
Camille: So that's why when I put these together, by say your job is to problem solve planning is a very powerful tool for problem solving. And therefore, if problem solving is the work, then planning is the work. You see how my logic works out?
George: Yes.
Camille: But I realize I might have some convincing to do here that what, how is planning a problem solving tool?
Camille: So that's what we're gonna walk through today is how does that even make sense? And I realize that some of this is just not having a clear understanding of what it means to really dig in and get deep into I hesitate to say expert level planning, but that's kind of what I wanna say.
Camille: Like getting more advanced, maybe I should say that. Being a more advanced planner is where it becomes a problem solving tool. How most people are doing planning today, it might not actually be helping them with problems. And so that might be where people are getting hung up. So we're gonna clarify all of this today and what it means to actually use planning, to solve problems in your business.
Camille: This came up also, because in our last episode, we talked about key problems of small businesses that, there's not enough clients or revenue or not enough time. And so they're struggling with all of these things.
Camille: And I just think it's important that business owners have the skills and the tools in order to handle these problems. And so this helps with one of our belief Shifts, which is instead of falling for the quick fix, because you need to solve a problem. This is one of those foundational elements: getting good at planning so that you can be a good problem solver.
Camille: And working upstream on those problems is really what's gonna be foundational for your business. So that's how this all sort of ties together.
George: Yeah.
Camille: Did you have any problems this week in business, George?
George: Nope. No problems.
Camille: Not one?
George: Oh my goodness. There was so many. How can I say this without revealing corporate secrets? Yes, we had problems.
George: So I work in a business where we're working with other companies all the time. And one of the problems we have is trying to match interests. Sometimes we're going after different markets. We talk at the same customers in different ways. So working together, we're trying to match up our messaging and what we wanted say to customers, that's not always easy.
George: So one of the problems was dealing with this week with a couple of our partners was okay, we in the room understand what we wanna say, why are we not able to get that out to our sales force? Why are they not picking it up? That was one problem.
George: There's another problem this week where there's a big meeting that I think by intention started out agendaless. The idea was this is the first time this particular group of people were meeting in a long time. And so they wanted to give everybody a chance to contribute and build the agenda in the meeting from scratch. It could be done, but I think it's very difficult.
George: And the hard part there is doing that in a way that people feel they're bought in, but not rudderless to actually get stuff done.
Camille: So real life problems. Were there plans around these and they just maybe didn't go to plan.
George: The internal meeting one I don't know that there were plans.
George: I think it was on purpose supposed to meant to be, just get a bunch of people here. We knew the people wanted to get together and all work it out. Cause we haven't all listened to each other. So I don't think there was a whole lot of planning around that that I could tell.
George: The hard part was really being disciplined about holding to the agenda that we did and that got off track a lot.
Camille: That's such a great what example, what you just brought up. In the future, we should definitely talk about the challenge of when you're trying to run different types of meetings and how do you plan for them differently? As opposed to, I just wanna write an agenda.
Camille: And also then that second one, even if you have a plan execution matters. It's not always gonna go perfectly. So what do you do when you're executing and it's not going to plan? You're not getting the outcome that you thought you were gonna get from that plan.
Camille: So those are all great topics that we should definitely dive more into before we get too far down the road on those.
Camille: Today, I just wanna focus on what does it mean to actually be good at planning in the first place? And how does that actually serve you from a problem solving perspective in your business?
Camille: I think of these two core aspects of planning, or problem solving that are the underlying foundational things that are messing things up for us. So one is we don't really learn how to be good at problem solving.
Camille: So we're just not really good at it. Nobody really teaches you how to do that. There's no class on problem solving that you have to take in order to go through school, for example. So instead we end up sort of bandaiding problems, or we might just try to solve the problem by just doing more of the same.
Camille: If I just work a little harder, maybe I'll get through this problem. We cross our fingers sometimes just hope it'll go away. Or we're grasping at that closest quick solution.
Camille: What we often do not do is slow down and get to the root cause of the problem.
Camille: And I get it. We're busy. We don't have time who has time to just slow down and think about these things? It's hard to slow our brains down. It's hard to slow ourselves down. There's a lot of things that we have to do on our list.
Camille: So it's hard to do it, even if you do know how. But when you don't know how, then it's near impossible. What am I doing when I slow down and think about this problem?
Camille: So I think that's part one of what's underlying our challenge with being good at solving problems in our businesses.
Camille: The second one is mindset that I've seen some businesses have around just not wanting the problems to exist at all. I think most people who have worked in bigger companies have had this experience of working somewhere it wasn't okay to bring up the problem. You just were the naysayer and you were the negative Nelly.
Camille: You can also do this to yourself. If you're just your own business owner, you might be avoiding or ignoring the problems because you don't know what to do about them. It's easier to just pretend they're not even there. And so there's this resistance to accepting problems as part of our everyday work.
Camille: Really what we want is just flip our mindset into embracing problems as opportunities. Which I know for some people is way out there, crazy thinking. But when we do that, when we start to flip that thinking, we start to seek them out as opposed to try to just ignore that they're even there. We're looking for those problems because we know every time we identify one and can move through it, we've just upped our game.
Camille: That's my thought about these underlying problems.
Camille: What does that bring to mind for you, George?
George: Oh man. So many things. It really sits well with me when you're talking about how we're not really taught problem solving in school. I can think of specific examples in my career when I've been given a dose of problem solving troubleshooting techniques. But when I was taking software engineering classes in college and grad school, none of that covered debugging.
George: You have to debug to get your assignments done, but we're not given tools to debug. We're given tools on how to write specifications and how to write user interfaces and programming interfaces and talk to other developers, but nothing about how to troubleshoot debug problems. You learn that on the job.
George: And I've learned from a couple of really good people at troubleshooting techniques. Most of those troubleshooting techniques in software I can apply to life as well. Simplest problem. First, always if you're running with a problem, Always start with the think that would be the simplest to fix and the least traumatic because it costs you nothing to do it.
George: And if that turns out to be the problem, unplugging and plugging back in the device or something, very easy to fix rather than getting inside. But we're not taught even that technique and that technique can apply to non-technical problems as well. So that spoke well to me.
George: This idea of slowing down to get to the root cause reminds me of a manager I had was a really great guy, but he totally optimized for instant response time. He wanted everybody who reported to him to respond instantly to emails in the phone. And when you didn't respond within five minutes, literally he was on the phone to call you and ask, why haven't you gotten back to me very politely, but he wanted a response.
George: And because of that, most of the time, when we were trying to fix the situation, it was anything complicated that tool didn't work. He just wanted a response when sometimes you have to really stand back and think and plan how you wanna address it. That was no worky. I could go on, but those are couple of the main things that come to mind when you're telling, talking about this stuff.
Camille: I think it's far more common than we think. We do have this culture of hurry up, respond, get shit done. Just move through things. Don't slow down. Don't stop. We don't have time.
Camille: They literally have argued with clients over this idea of, we need to just slow down a minute in order to be able to take the next approach.
Camille: Cause I can see that you're barreling down the road and they're like, I just don't have time to do that. Yeah. And you know this, but our audience doesn't in my past job, pretty much my entire job when I was director of continuous improvement, was to teach the organization how to do problem solving.
Camille: Yeah. That's how widespread this inability to problem solve is. There are entire just consulting groups that that's all they're doing is going in and basically helping organize. There's a lot more to a continuous improvement or lean performance improvement environment, but it really comes down to how do you get to solving core problems and doing that as just a part of the work everyday activity.
Camille: So if you little business owner out there are feeling alone in this, you are absolutely not. I think this is definitely a good example of a, this is an all business problem. All businesses struggle with how to be good at problem solving. But absolutely you will struggle no more because we are here to help you.
Camille: So this is very important when I think about the idea of how do you build a high performance business. And a high performance business means high performance, you business owner leader. And that means being really good at this idea of how to solve problems. And I'm gonna connect this now back to planning and how planning becomes a tool for problem solving.
Camille: I get how those two things don't necessarily connect right away, but they do for me. And when we're all done, they will for you too.
Camille: So let's talk about what planning is, and is not first, let's just get to sort of the core elements. Cause I think part of the reason we don't think about planning as a tool for problem solving is that we do not have a good understanding of what planning actually can be and how to use it if you really go all in.
Camille: Again you take a little bit more of an advanced perspective on planning. Because I do think it's one of the most overlooked tools that we have in the toolbox for problem solving. I'm my hope is that people will start to embrace planning more when they realize that that's actually what it's for and not just a way to make a list of things to do.
Camille: Which is part one of what we get wrong about planning: that it's just a list of things to do. And it is not. Other things that we get wrong about planning are that we think it's something that we just do when we have extra time. That it's a document that I write up that will perfectly describe how I'm gonna move through all of the work. Or that it's something we just create once. So once, and then it's done.
Camille: We don't ever go back. Yeah. We're supposed to follow that plan perfectly. Some people have told me they think planning is very restrictive and soul crushing. Yes. Somebody used that word with me one time. Some people might think it's just for nerds that maybe that's true. I don't know.
Camille: Actually, I do know that there are some nerds who actually don't really enjoy planning. So who knows?
Camille: It also can be just seen as something that's just for leaders or office workers to do. Not for anybody who's on the frontline of a business, not for them. Planning is not their job. Something that you do on your own that it's maybe just an individual activity. I just make a plan on my own. I don't include others in that.
Camille: And then my last two, these are sort of related, but they're flipped a little bit. So the first one is that I've gotta plan all the work before I can do the work. So this is when you get stuck in the over planning trap, it's a way to avoid doing the work.
Camille: The flip of that is I need to get more work done before I can plan. Both of those I have seen happen. What am I missing? Are there, is there any other misconceptions you've seen?
Camille: No, this captures this so well, but when I think about sometimes when plans go wrong one way that expresses itself, I have to do all this planning before work is the plans get overly deep and complicated.
Camille: You have plans that have steps and sub and sub subception plans, the balance between simple and actual and complete or overcomplicated.
Camille: Yes, absolutely. So there is such a thing as over planning, which can be either I'm spending too much time doing it, or I've gone to such a level of degree, it's diminishing returns in this plan.
Camille: Yeah. I went to a level of detail that A isn't manageable now. So the plan needs to be something I could actually look at and have it be manageable, nor is it even useful, cuz there's so much information that I get information overload. So I can't use the plan well. So absolutely you can go too far.
George: I can see where you mentioned some people who , think of as restricted and soul crushing. I know people who are kind of doers, they're people of action. They to be busy and I can see where those people think, if I'm planning, I'm not doing something. And there's some people who they haven't had any training in planning.
George: And so they will just say, I don't know how to plan what I'm doing. I have a bunch of stuff that comes in. Don't ask me to plan. I don't know when the customers are gonna come in and ask me questions.
Camille: Yeah. The other type of person that I see the ones that say the soul crushing part, they're the creatives. I'm creative and I'm constantly creating and doing that type of work. It's not so much that they're driven to just do things, but that they want the freedom and the ebb and the flow of their day to not be boxed in by this plan, even if it's just a plan they made for themselves.
Camille: So one of the things that I argue when you do planning is that it's actually a tool that will set you free. It will give you freedom in your job when you do planning. And I know if you're one of those creators that's out there going, yeah, that's right, I don't plan because I gotta be free.
Camille: I get it. But it actually is a tool that will create more freedom in your work. And we're gonna talk now about really when you do planning, what does it do for you? So here's all the things that I think planning will do for you when you start to get it.
Camille: First and foremost planning is a tool for critical thinking and better decision making.
George: That's awesome.
Camille: That is one of the most important things that when you do planning that's what you're putting into play. And every business owner could use a little more critical thinking in their business. And we have to work at that. .
Camille: And so when I think about planning, I think, well, that's the thing that draws you into the critical thinking space, cuz you don't necessarily just default to that.
Camille: It takes some effort. So you need something that helps enable that. That's what planning does.
Camille: Yeah. It is also a process for helping you select what the work is to do so that your list of tasks is really targeted. And it's not this overwhelming unmanageable list of things, but it's targeted to the things that are actually gonna move the needle.
Camille: It's also a way to evaluate the risks and the ops obstacles that might be coming up. So I often hear people say, well, all this unexpected stuff always happens and we never know what it's gonna be.
Camille: You know more of what unexpected things will happen than you think you do. And when you stop long enough to make a plan and think about those things, you can then put some mitigation plans in place.
Camille: There will always be surprises. You will not be able to do all of them. But you could do more than you think. So when I ever I sit down with people to do that part, all of a sudden, all the examples start to show up and we're, oh, what do we do in that scenario? What are we do in that scenario?
Camille: And it's amazing because what it does is it actually gives you more confidence in what you're about to go do, because you've thought through a lot of the things that might get in the way. So reducing anxiety about what you're about to go work on, because you sort of pre-thought through what will I do in case of X, Y, or Z.
Camille: It's also a way for you to do continuous learning and improvement, which equals solve problems. That's really what that means. When you're doing continuous learning, you're doing continuous improvement, you are continuously solving problems. And it is a way for you to when you return back to your plan and you're doing regular reflection, we talked about this earlier. Just that idea of do we stop long enough to reflect, assess and adjust. That's what reflection should lead to. And the plan is basically the tool for you to be able to do that. So it's giving you this place to have that continuous learning and improvement activity occur. It is also a process that has you identify in your priorities.
Camille: So it increases the focus on the work and makes the whole path clear. So what is most important for me to work on? Not just today, but down the road? And it's a way also to bring people together and align around a common goal.
Camille: So if you're working with a team, having to collaborate with other organizations, even if it's just you by yourself, you might think you're not gonna need to do planning if it's just you and your little business.
Camille: But the reality is even as a solopreneur, you're still not doing all of this. You still are counting on someone else to help you get the work done. And when you plan the right way, you start to bring and collaborate and create those allies with all of the people that you need.
Camille: And then finally, the way that I started this, the last one is that it's really the tools and principles are what provide freedom and flow in your work.
Camille: I've seen it happen over and over again where people use these tools wrong and make them very restrictive. So if you've had that experience, if you're like, nope, my experience with any time there was a project or a plan, it was very restricting, then it wasn't done well. It wasn't done well enough to get you to the place where it actually provided some freedom and flow in the work, which is the ultimate goal.
Camille: So just keep that in mind that any one of these things, if you haven't experienced them and you're, that's not been my experience with planning at all. It doesn't surprise me because you can very easily use planning as a hammer, just get stuff done people. That's not really what it's intended to do.
Camille: It is intended to help you get work done at a more expedited, effective, efficient manner. But not by just driving to get more things done, actually, by doing all the things that I'm talking about, the critical thinking, the problem solving, engaging with people in that work.
Camille: So there's a bit of a shift that has to happen in order for planning to really deliver those things to you. But it's not hard. What's hard to do is actually get yourself in the mindset of, I just need to take a little time and put in a little effort to do it.
George: Yeah, absolutely.
Camille: Those are all my thoughts about the planning and how it is good.
Camille: What do you think of the benefits?
George: All those benefits. And I think about a lot of the same ones. For me personally, I'm almost always in a state where I've got too many things in my head, too many things going on.
George: And so for me, planning is a way to write things down. When I write them down, I get them outta my head. It clears my mind. It's a really good technique. And when my mind is clear, I can be more calm when I execute stuff. So planning is a good way to do that. Even if the plan goes wrong, at least I've gotten those ideas outta my head.
George: For organizational effectiveness, and this happens in at least big organizations, plans are a good communication mechanism for a group. In reorgs or big organizational changes the ability to tell people, okay, here's the picture. Here's why we've given you these different tasks or why we need you to think about doing something different.
George: Here's how it maps to the plan. that's a really effective communication mechanism. People seeing that this part of a plan calms them. And then another thing is for me, I was just thinking about Savita. My wife was ran her annual gala event last night for the nonprofit. It went off great.
George: And it went off great because they planned well. Which means that when she got to the event, she had already had a script or something that told her generally what was gonna happen. So she wasn't walking in unprepared and how to kind of be anxious about what do I do next? She knew the timing for everything.
George: It was sort of a dress rehearsal. And even if things went wrong, there's a whole bunch of stuff that she knew should happen. And I think there's a lot of power in that.
Camille: I think you bring up a couple of really good points.
Camille: The one about communicating with other people. Even if you're just a small business owner of one at one and a half or whatever, I still think that communication, that clarity you need. So to get so much clarity with yourself about what your business is about. And doing the plan is how you do that.
Camille: And I know you're like, oh, I know what I'm doing. No, most of the time, we actually don't have good clarity about that. And the exercise of having to make a plan around that is what gets you the clarity. So, yeah, even without the big business, cuz huge and big business, everybody has gotta be on the same page and you give everybody aligned.
Camille: Small businesses if you've got five employees, a hundred employees, hugely important to get everybody aligned. But even if you're just a businesses of one, I think you still have the same problem. You still need clarity and understanding and setting expectations with yourself about what you're about to go do in your business.
Camille: Still really important.
George: That makes sense.
Camille: Yeah. And then the second thing you brought up about the gala example, I love that example because I think what people sometimes think that a plan is supposed to do is make that event be flawless.
Camille: And what it's really supposed to do is it's supposed to head off as many problems, reduce anxiety, bring clarity. So for her, it was, she was very clear about exactly what she was supposed to do. So that way she was at ease as she walked in. And then if problems did happen, she had the energy to handle them easily, knowing what was supposed to happen.
Camille: And she could spot the problems easily too, because she was like, well, A is supposed to happen according to plan, that looks it's not according to plan. Oh, I should probably address it. If you don't have a plan, it's much harder to identify, is that a problem or not a problem? Is that okay? Or is that not okay?
Camille: Should, should we allow this to happen or not to happen? So it's not about the plan being perfect. It's about giving you this baseline for improvement, which again, takes me back to why planning is about solving problems. It helps you be a better problem solver in that way.
Camille: So, wow. Thank you for that example.
Camille: And that was great. That's doing your job, George.
Camille: So with all of these benefits, who in the heck wouldn't want to plan? Hope is at this point people listening are like, oh, I hope she tells us how to do this. Cuz now I'm super into it and excited.
Camille: I realize that's maybe not so true, but if not, try and get yourself into that head space of, well maybe you'll give this planning thing a little bit more thought. Because I think a lot of the challenge with our resistance, again comes back to that we just don't know how. We don't know how to do this well.
Camille: So let's talk about how, if you wanna become an expert problem solver, starting to become more of an expert planner will actually help you get there. So here's where I think you start.
Camille: There's two buckets of activities for you to do to start becoming a better problem solver.
Camille: And there's a lot in here. So I decided I was gonna create a guide around this. So there will be a guide, a link in the show notes so you can grab this. There's gonna be bullet points of things you can do. And I know you're either walking the dog or driving your car as you're listening. So you can't take these notes.
Camille: So I have the notes for you and you can download this because if you're struggling to figure out how to use planning well in your business, this will be a great starting point. So this will be your planning 1 0 1 guide for how to get started.
Camille: So I'm gonna walk through it right now. Are you ready? Yes, let's do it.
Camille: So the first part is mindset. There are five ideas that I want you to embrace. And you may not have trouble with all five of these, but these are the top five that I see that it really helps when people start to think about planning in a little bit of a different frame.
Camille: the The first is to approach planning like it's a skill. It's not something you're either good at or not good at. So I hear that a lot. Well, I'm just not good at planning. Well, sure, I'm also not good at playing the tuba, but I could be if I started practicing. So to get good at planning, just look at it like another skill that you wanna learn.
Camille: And I might not ever become an expert tuba player, but I can certainly learn how to play the tuba. And so business owners, you don't necessarily have to become an expert planner, maybe striving to be one would be great, but just learning how to do planning better. That's the great thing about planning is you don't have to be perfect at it for it to get value out of it, to get the benefits from it.
Camille: So two parts to approaching planning like a skill. The first one is practice regularly planning. It's a skill. So practice it. And there's lots of layers at which you can practice this. There's the big picture, strategic planning. There's your daily planning.
Camille: There's all sorts of planning in between. So there's different levels and complexities and pick something that works for you. If you're already doing some of these, maybe figure out where you might have some gaps in planning and maybe pick one of those up. Maybe you're great at doing big picture planning, but you don't do the regular day to day planning or vice versa.
Camille: Maybe you're good at the daily planning, but you haven't done any really big picture, annual or strategic plan in your business. So start thinking about practicing, how to do that.
Camille: As you do it, keep in mind that there's some bad advice out there about how to plan and what to do. So try to learn from some expert planners, there's tons of information, but also there's The Belief Shift.
Camille: We'll be talking about this all the time.
Camille: But it is important to get some guidance on how to do planning well, because this is just one of those terms that gets thrown around and can get used in not the same definition that I'm providing you. So watch out for that as you start getting good at practicing this.
Camille: So that's number one in the mindset; approach, planning like a skill.
Camille: The second one is: do not expect perfection. There's no such thing. You cannot create a perfect plan. That is not the point of creating a plan. Remember, the point is: the critical thinking that goes into creating the plan. That's what matters.
Camille: And that you wanna keep repeating that process of applying critical thinking to your work all the time. So you wanna create plans and update plans, not try to create a perfect one.
Camille: The third one is the plan is nothing without execution. So this is the do not plan so much that it keeps you from actually doing any of the work, don't hide behind planning. Don't be that over planner.
Camille: So you've got to do some of the work before you can improve the plan. Remember I just said, you're gonna have an imperfect plan. How do you make it better? You have to do some of the work so that you have more knowledge and you're a little smarter and that lets you make a better plan going forward, so you can keep improving it as you go.
Camille: So don't wait for a perfect plan to start doing the work, but also don't wing it and start doing work without any plan at all. You need a balance in here. So you want to do the work and work to perfect the plan as you're working. Does that make sense?
George: Yeah, absolutely. I love that.
Camille: The fourth one which we've talked about before is: planning is the work. George likes that phrase.
Camille: I love that planning is the work please satisfy fine to me. I should have made that at the top of the list. Planning is the work. That's the number one mindset you have to put in your head.
Camille: And then the last one is something I've also talked about before, but I will keep repeating this, which is to remember that it's always about people.
Camille: People are complicated and they can't be trusted to just follow a plan that you lay out and guess what? That means you cannot trust yourself to follow your own plan. Have you had that happen? You made a plan and you were like, why didn't I follow my plan? What am I doing now? Yeah. And then you're sorry that you totally went off your own plan.
George: I'm actually still wondering why I do that.
George: Yes, that's true.
Camille: My answer to that is gonna be you're human. That's basically it, we are complicated and we're human and we often just don't follow our own best laid plans, much less anyone else's. So build relationships, make the expectations, clear, understand other people's perspectives.
Camille: And , don't be a task master with the plan, even with yourself. Yeah. Do not be a task master, just trying to drive yourself to complete this plan, but be a collaborator and a leader, and yes, with yourself.
Camille: We're gonna talk sometime down the road about leadership and what it means to be a leader to yourself and your business.
Camille: That's gonna be a whole fun topic.
Camille: So those are the five things when you think about your mindset around expert planning.
Camille: Would you add anything to that George?
George: No, I don't think so. There's this tie between planning and execution and reforming. When I think about good plans and executing 'em I always think about this example somebody told me about missile guidance systems and how we think of them setting a target, and then they just go. But what they really do is they're constantly making adjustment little tiny adjustments all the time, and that's how they get to card it.
George: They don't make one big adjustment every hour or so. Nope. Constantly adjusting the plan.
Camille: I like that analogy. That's exactly what we're doing. The idea that when we wanna get from point A to point B, it's not just this linear straight shot. Your plan isn't doing that.
Camille: It's gonna look like that when you first make it. I think I got a straight shot and then, nope. It's gonna have all sorts of zigs and zags and what you're trying to do in the replanning process, every time you come back and update the plan is you're gonna see oh, I'm getting off plan over here.
Camille: This is how I'm gonna adjust and get back.
Camille: And this is also back to referencing the lean performance improvement work. This is known as the cycle of PDCA or Plan, Do, Check, Adjust. It's continuous improvement circle. That's what project planning and planning is all about.
George: Fighter pilots, OODA loop, same thing.
Camille: OODA loop?
George: OODA: Orient, Observe, Decide, Act.
Camille: All this military stuff. You've never even been to the military and you're doing missiles and fighter pilots?
Camille: Get back in your zone. Get back to Star Trek.
George: It is interesting though. I mean, they think that really the ads observe orient or orient observe, decide act. So you kind of gauge your situation, make a quick decision about what you're gonna do and act, and then reassess quickly. Very, very tight loops.
Camille: Yes. Very tight loops. Yeah. Depending on what it is you're working on that either smaller or bigger cycle.
Camille: Let's talk about the next part of how to become an expert planner. Okay. So that's the mindset stuff. The next part is: how do you create when you're creating the plan? So instead of just walking through the standard elements of a plan, I decided to present this as what questions should you be asking as you're working on creating a plan?
George: Oh, cool.
Camille: You might be asking some of these questions already, but some of them you might not. So I'm gonna run through these questions again. It's gonna be in the guide. So if you're like, I'm never gonna retain all this in my brain. It's okay.
Camille: These questions, I think you should have in front of you every time you're starting to think about making a plan.
Camille: It's probably not a totally exhaustive list cuz I don't wanna overwhelm, but there's a lot here and it's really gonna get to all the essential pieces that will help you. And what it's doing is these questions are gonna help you identify problems and actually start working those problems upstream.
Camille: And that's what we're after. That's why I say this is turning you more into an expert problem solver, cuz the more you can solve problems upstream as opposed to when they're in front of your face and really causing all the big disruption, the better off you're gonna be.
Camille: So ready for the questions? Here we go.
Camille: Question number one to ask yourself when you're creating the plan, what is my goal or objective? So we're always starting with, what are we trying to accomplish?
Camille: What do I need to get done? What's the whole point of the plan? What am I trying to accomplish? So starting with that, that's the first question. Always start there. We usually start with all the things we need to do. Nope. Start with what actually do I need to accomplish. And if you could make that a measurable, specific goal, even better. But even if you can't just saying anything will be better than saying nothing at all.
Camille: Yeah. So that's step one. The next question to ask is how can I limit the scope of my plan so that I am most likely to succeed? And so here's how this shows up sometimes in small businesses, especially. But it can show up anywhere. So I have this thing that I wanna accomplish. And what I do is I create this big grandiose vision of all the greatness that it's going to have.
Camille: Yeah. So maybe I'm launching a new program or a service to my clients, and I want it to be all the things. I've got 10 things I wanna do for them. But it's my first time. So what might serve me better is to limit the scope and look at that and say, well, maybe I don't do all 10 of the things the first time around, because I'm gonna have to build all the pieces.
Camille: So maybe I just do six or eight of them, because I'm more likely to be successful in that. And then the next time around, I can add the other ones in, the bigger picture in. So thinking about how do I scope this in a way that I'm setting myself up for success? Instead of trying to create this big, giant goal that feels ,like, perfection, I create a goal that is not that ideal, big, perfect state, but is enough to really get things moving.
Camille: And I think this is really important, cuz a lot of the efforts that I see people wanting to do in their small businesses, they're just biting off more than they can chew. Yeah. So this is you being honest with yourself about what's feasible for me to do in this first effort, this first project. So limit the scope of your plan as much as you can.
Camille: The third question, what are the risks or the obstacles that might get in my way? And then how can I mitigate them? We talked about this a little bit before, but often we think random things are gonna happen and I can't anticipate them. So why bother making a plan? I hear this a lot.
Camille: Well, the point is to actually start looking at and anticipating what risk or obstacles might happen. And when you stop and actually think about it, you'd be surprised how many of those you can come up with. And you're not gonna come up with all of them, but you can definitely come up with some ideas for what's gonna show up and how you can just reduce their impact.
Camille: You might not be able to eliminate them. Some of them you might be able to. You might say, if I do X, Y, Z, today, then that problem won't happen. So that's great. But that's not necessarily the objective. The objective is really to just have some insight into what could get in your way, and start to work those problems.
Camille: The fourth one is: who's help do I need? Who do I need relationships with? Who do I need to set expectations with? Who do I need to ally with? So this is preventing the problem of, oops, I didn't tell George that I needed to have him look at the thing before we got on the podcast.
Camille: And so now I have the problem of I'm gonna run outta time on the podcast because I didn't communicate clearly with him. So you wanna make sure you've got people on board with whatever it is that you're gonna do so that you're preventing problems with them down the road. Also people don't like surprises by the way.
Camille: When you were talking about that, George and the plan is a great way to communicate to an organization. Yes! This is my point. I always tell project managers as they're getting into their work, your job is no surprises. You want a communication about this plan that's so good that there's no surprises. Yeah, absolutely.
Camille: You want that for yourself too. Again, if you're a solopreneur and you're thinking, well, that doesn't apply to me. Yeah. It applies to you too. So make sure you're really got that clear. Who's help you need, even though you think you're not gonna need that. You are, we're not doing it by ourselves. Nobody's doing it by themselves.
Camille: So the next one is: what tools or equipment do you need? And what's the lead time. That's really the killer in the tools and equipment. I'm gonna need something. And I didn't think about the lead time, especially in today's day and age of nothing shows up in two days from Amazon, like it used to.
Camille: The next question is: what's a reasonable timeline for me to complete this? And is there a hard deadline or not? Oftentimes for small business owners, we're kind of making up our own timelines. I'd really like to launch my podcast next quarter. But nothing is hinging on that.
Camille: Nobody's counting on you to do that except for you and your business. So you need to create a timeline for yourself that's reasonable, but also is pushing yourself a little bit to actually get that thing done. So that next year, when you're planning your business, you're not just saying, well, I guess next year I'm gonna do all the things that I said I was gonna do last year, but I didn't do. So now they're back on the list again, cuz then guess what your business is stagnating.
Camille: So try to set some timeline for completion that makes sense. And then hold yourself to that as best you can.
Camille: The last question to ask yourself is: how will I update my plan? So back to what we were talking about with that cycle of improvement yeah. You need to make a plan for how you're gonna update the plan.
Camille: That's very meta, I know. But you need to make time to reflect and assess and adjust that plan. And if you don't make a plan for doing that, it won't happen. And by making a plan, I mean, schedule time on your calendar. I have a slot on my calendar every week. That's my weekly planning slot. And that's what I do in that time. And I don't do anything else. It always happens there. So do something similar for your plan.
Camille: So those are all of the questions that I think if you started to ask those questions, as you're thinking about planning, you're gonna be able to get out ahead of some of the potential problems that'll show up down the road.
Camille: And then when you're updating plan, you'll be addressing any of the new problems or obstacles that'll showed up. So the plan's gonna get even better. And then that's really how this whole thing connects back to problem solving. You're either working problems upstream, or you are actually preparing yourself with this foundation of how things are supposed to go, so that problems show up more easily for you. So they're easier for you to tackle cuz you can spot them more quickly. Maybe spot them before they grow into some big, giant problem. It's
Camille: really giving you an opportunity to get at those problems and start digging into and solving them more quickly and more effectively. It's sort of a proactive approach.
Camille: I'm gonna proactively go out and seek out the problems instead of just sort of waiting for them to show up and I'm gonna be ready for them should they show up. That's really what we're trying to do.
George: That's cool.
Camille: Now the one thing I will say about the problem solving is there is a framework there's a couple frameworks for how to just do problem solving itself.
George: Huh? Yeah.
Camille: And we, we are gonna talk about this not today, but in a couple episodes, I think at the end of the month, there'll be an episode where we'll just do a quick tips episode, just on a couple of ways to think about problem solving itself. Because that is a thing too, that you will need to do, and it will serve you as you're working on your plan.
Camille: So we'll do that later, but today I really just wanted to focus on planning as a way to help you do more upstream problem solving.
George: May I make a couple comments.
Camille: Please do.
George: One comment is so the steps of your lists are great. What, for some reason it reminded me of what Aaron Sorkin do, Moneyball, Few Good Men.
George: Great, great screenwriter. What he says about how he goes about writing, it all comes down to these two things: intention and obstacle. So he says, when I think about a story, I think about what the character's intent is, what they wanna try to accomplish. And then I put an obstacle in front of them and then remove that and then their next intention.
George: And that's how I work through a story. I thought, wow, how that's the way he breaks down his writing process for these fantastic pieces of writing. And that is, I mean, there's two of these steps here. The first one, what's my goal rejected. And later on, what are the risks for obstacles that get my way he, .
George: That's the core of what he thinks about that's one thought. Cool. Huh?
Camille: Yeah, that is cool. Now when you're planning, you can just imagine you're in an Aaron Sorkin movie.
George: You're writing an Aaron Sorkin movie. Yeah.
Camille: You're the character in it, cuz you're the guy doing all this stuff.
George: The other thought is one of my Achilles heels for planning is I'm an optimist.
George: And so I tend not to think about what's gonna go wrong and to correct that I go back to an old friend of mine. My friend Sturgiss who long time ago told me, George, I'm just a pessimism. So whenever something to figure out happens, or somebody's offering me deal or something, I always ask myself, how am I gonna get screwed in this deal?
George: And I remember the first time you told me that I thought it, oh man, that's so depressing. But he's like, no, no, no. It just helps me think through what could possibly go wrong. And so to anticipate that.
George: For me, eternal optimist is hard for me to think about obstacles, putting that on my question list for, okay, how am I gonna get screwed with this plan, or with this step, is really helpful for me apply a little skepticism.
Camille: Yes.
George: Other people will have different achilles heels that one's mine. I think that is for a
Camille: lot of people. I see this happen a lot and I do it too, where I set up a, a plan and I'm like, oh, that'll be perfect.
Camille: Nope. As soon as you're thinking. The P word, you gotta roll, roll it back and be, nope. That's never gonna happen that way. Yeah. And how do I plan accordingly? . So what am I doing to really mitigate even myself? Because one of your obstacles in your plan is also gonna be you. How am I gonna get in my own way with this?
Camille: Yeah, it can, some of it can be I'm gonna overestimate what I can do in a day. That's a big one. And it's usually cuz I'm gonna underestimate how many things are gonna be asked of me in a day. I'm gonna imagine I'm gonna have all this time to work on this thing and then I'm not, it turns out. So I'm gonna fall behind and I didn't make a plan for that.
Camille: It didn't adjust for that in the plan. So it is difficult to write a plan with a timeline that is with any sense of reality. And I think that's another reason we struggle to do any planning is doing it in a way that we could actually feasibly stick to and then we wanna give up. Cause we're like, oh this plan isn't working.
Camille: Yeah. It's not working. Make it better. And I think that's essentially what I want you to do. Cuz that's then oh, now I have to do a critical thinking to make it better. Not give up. Yeah. But actually improve my approach to this. Yeah. And that means reflecting on where am I messing this up? Oh, I'm being way too optimistic about how much I'm gonna get done in a day.
Camille: Great. I just identified a problem and now I can actually work to solve it. Could I be more efficient? Most likely it's that you've been too distracted. You haven't said no to enough things to make this a priority. There's all sorts of things that get in the way, but you can start working through them. What's actually happening here and how can I make this project a priority so that I do get it done.
Camille: How am I making these trade offs in my business so that it can accomplish the thing that's really important to me. That's a really important aspect of the plan. So I love that you said that part about you being overly optimistic. Yeah. Cause I think it's most of us. I mean, we all think we're gonna get more done in the day than we do.
Camille: Which is why. Yeah. I think that's part of where that crazy time management that we talked about before, where that sort of comes into play. I'm supposed to be better with my time and get more done. Yeah. We're constantly beating ourselves up about that. And I get how that makes people not want to plan.
Camille: But flip it around. Flip it around to no, wait, if I don't plan, I don't even have a chance at getting any of that stuff done. Yeah. The plan is what gives me a chance.
Camille: That is all I have about planning. Of course, this could go much deeper and nerdier if we wanted to. And I would totally do that, but I think this is plenty for people to grab onto. Again, there will be a guide which does nerd out just a little bit more than I did in today's episode.
Camille: So if you wanna dive more into planning, I highly encourage you to grab that outta the show notes. There will be a link for that.
Camille: But before we depart. Let's talk about our key takeaways from this episode, just to wrap things up with a nice tidy little bow. Do you wanna talk about takeaways or you want me to do it?
George: I'll start. Think about the problems your business is opportunities. Every problem you have is an opportunity to make things better. It's one takeaway.
George: You wanna make most of your problem. This is my big takeaway from this show become better at planning, become an expert. Helps eliminate problems upstream, not all of them. But the more problems you can eliminate upfront better off you'll be later on.
George: We're gonna teach you about how to deal with problems. The ones that remain there are lots of tools for that. Practice planning as a skill. There's a lot of podcasts we're gonna have about kind of big picture ideas. And a lot of podcasts we have about skill building. Think about planning as a skill. And this beautiful thing: planning is about problem solving and planning is the work.
George: It's not an extra activity. It is the work.
Camille: It is the work.
George: Yeah. Great takeaways, Camille.
Camille: Thank you. You said them so well, George, it was fun to hear it coming from you.
Camille: That's it for planning for today. And I just wanna say we really appreciate getting some great comments from listeners as I run into you in real life.
Camille: And I love all your comments. We got a couple five star reviews on apple podcast, by the way. I don't think either one of them were mom, so they might be real.
George: Wasn't me.
Camille: And it wasn't me. So thank you to whoever left us five star reviews on apple podcast. And if you haven't and you have a moment, boy, that does a whole lot to help us spread the word about the pod.
Camille: So please do jump in there really quick. Or if you don't have time for that and you're on Instagram, just hang out there, send us a comment, shoot us a direct message. Whatever we'd love to hear from you. We are @thebeliefshift on Instagram.
Camille: And that's it. Thanks everybody, and we will be back in your ears next week.
George: See you later.
George:
