The Pulse - The plan is only as good as the system running it
Every September, the same room. Revenue up, cost base trimmed, headcount held flat, next year’s growth number pencilled in against a market that has not changed all that much on paper.
Nobody in that room asks the one question the plan actually depends on: whether the system that delivered this year’s number has the same left in it to deliver next year’s.
The organisation on the org chart and the organisation actually running the business are not always the same thing by the time Q4 planning starts. One is a diagram. The other is whatever is left of the people holding it together after eleven months of a demanding year.
You are about to build, or have just built, exactly this plan. It gets built on last year’s structure and this year’s ambition. What it rarely gets built on is an honest answer to what your leadership team, and the layer beneath them actually executing it, have left to give.
A target is a bet on capacity you have not measured. Most boards would not accept that framing applied to capital. Applied to people, it is standard practice.
What the org chart does not show you
Last month this newsletter was about one person, the leader still delivering while quietly coming apart underneath it. The same gap exists one level up, across the whole system, and it is invisible for the same reason: the org chart shows you roles and reporting lines, not what capacity is actually left in the people filling them.
Here is where that gap actually shows up. The initiative that slips in Q3 because the team executing it was already stretched before it started, and nobody flagged that at the planning stage because nobody had the data to flag it with. The strategy that reads identically to last year’s and performs measurably worse, for reasons the post mortem calls market conditions, because that is easier to write down than the same twelve people delivered it with less left in the tank than they had eleven months ago. The leadership team that hits every number this year and loses two of its best people in the first quarter of the next, because the plan never asked what hitting the number actually cost them.
Every plan assumes a system capable of delivering it. Almost none of them test whether that assumption still holds before it gets signed off.
The timing makes it worse
This lands at the worst point in the year to ask for it. Leadership teams are back from a break that paused the clock without resetting anything underneath it, and are now being asked, in the same six weeks, to close out this year and commit to next year’s number. The demand curve rises exactly when the reserve is at its lowest point of the year.
The plan for growth and the capacity to deliver it are being decided in the same six weeks, by the same people, with no data on which of the two is actually sound.
What would actually tell you something
Not another strategy day that starts from the org chart and this year’s ambition. A system level reading of where demand and resource are actually sitting across the teams the plan depends on, the leadership table and the layer beneath it that has to execute what gets signed off. Our OHFB organisational assessment is built for exactly this: structured, aggregated data across a function or a business, not a coaching conversation with one person, so what you are planning against is the system as it actually is rather than the org chart as it was drawn.
That is worth pricing before the targets get signed off, not after they get missed. A plan built against real capacity is one you can actually hold people to, and hit. It is also the plan that keeps the team who delivered this year still in the business to deliver next year’s, rather than replacing two of them by Easter. Most organisations only find out what their system could sustain by exceeding it. Few price what planning against the real number is worth.
That is the difference between a target that is a guess dressed as a plan, and a target you can actually stand behind.
PAUSE AND NOTICE
Think about the plan currently being built for next year.
How much of it assumes your team has the same capacity it had in January?
If you asked the people actually executing it, not just the leadership table, what would they tell you about what is left to give?
What would it be worth knowing that before you sign off the number, rather than after you miss it?
The performance you cannot measure is still shaping the performance you can.
The person you nearly lost last month and the plan you are about to sign off this month are the same problem, at two different altitudes.
If this has named something you have been circling, we would welcome a conversation.