Page 150 - 25148.pdf

138 • The 100 Greatest Ideas for Building the Business of Your Dreams

A person agrees to an activity, but team members do not believe he or she has
the necessary knowledge or skills to carry it out.
A necessary activity is in someone else's province and we duck the issue of
how to get that person's buy-in to the plan.
An activity is agreed which depends on higher management agreement and no
plan is put in place to gain this.
An activity is agreed which depends oh the customer, and no plan is put in
place to ensure that the customer can and does achieve the dependency.

Think before you speak

Don't stick to this too rigidly because sometimes people do think through an idea
while they are articulating it. But it is a useful rule to agree before the planning
session starts so that we can use it to muffle someone who frequently waffles.

The facilitator will present these rules to the team and, given that they agree to
abide by them, the planning session proper can begin.

Idea 87 - Connect analysis to objectives tightly

A lot of planning sessions fail because the planners find it impossible to get their
brains round a good and detailed analysis and produce objectives that reflect it. You
need at this point a neat bridging mechanism to act as a connector between the
SWOT analysis and the plan itself. Without this simple device it is very difficult to
get a good link, and basically to know where to start.

You need one other ingredient. Idea 75 mentioned the importance of under-
standing your critical success factors. Write these down in the left column of a ma-
trix with five columns. Now number the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and
threats. This is nothing to do with priorities; it is simply a mechanism for identifying