The Five Phases

About the five phases

It goes without saying, but still it must be said again:

thinking in more effective ways about projects and situations can make things happen sooner, better, and more successfully.

So if our minds plan naturally anyway, what can we learn from that?

How can we use that model to facilitate getting more and better results in our thinking?

Let's examine each of the five phases of natural planning and see how we can leverage these contexts.

Purpose & principles

It never hurts to ask the "why?" question.

Almost anything you're currently doing can be enhanced and even galvanized by more scrutiny at this top level of focus.

Examples

Why are you going to your next meeting?
What's the purpose of your task?
Why are you having friends over for a barbeque in the backyard?
Why are you hiring a marketing director?
Why do you have a budget?

I admit it: this is nothing but advanced common sense.

To know and to be clear about the purpose of any activity are prime directives for clarity, creative development, and cooperation.

But it's common sense that's not commonly practiced, simply because it's so easy for us to create things, get caught up in the form of what we've created, and let our connection with our real and primary intentions slip.

I know, based upon thousands of hours spent in many offices with many sophisticated people, that the "why?" question cannot be ignored.

When people complain to me about having too many meetings, I have to ask, "What is the purpose of the meetings?"

When they ask, "Who should I invite to the planning session?" I have to ask, "What's the purpose of the planning session?"

Until we have the answer to my questions, there's no possible way to come up with an appropriate response to theirs.

The Value of Thinking About "Why"

Here are just some of the benefits of asking "why?":

• It defines success.
• It creates decision-making criteria.
• It aligns resources.
• It motivates.
• It clarifies focus.
• It expands options.

Let's take a closer look at each of these in turn.

It Defines Success

People are starved for "wins" these days.

We love to play games, and we like to win, or at least be in a position where we could win.

And if you're not totally clear about the purpose of what you're doing, you have no chance of winning.

Purpose defines success.

It's the primal reference point for any investment of time and energy, from deciding to run for elective office to designing a form.

Ultimately you can't feel good about a staff meeting unless you know what the purpose of the meeting was.

And if you want to sleep well, you'd better have a good answer when your board asks why you fired your V.P. of marketing or hired that hotshot M.B.A. as your new finance director.

You won't really know whether or not your business plan is any good until you hold it up against the success criterion that you define by answering the question "Why do we need a business plan?"

It Creates Decision-Making Criteria

How do you decide whether to spend the money for a five-color brochure or just go with a two-color?

How do you know whether it's worth hiring a major Web design firm to handle your new Web site?

It all comes down to purpose.

Given what you're trying to accomplish, are these resource investments required, and if so, which ones?

There's no way to know until the purpose is clarified.

It Aligns Resources

How should we spend our staffing allocation in the corporate budget?

How do we best use the cash flow right now to maximize our viability as a retailer over the next year?

Should we spend more money on the luncheon or the speakers for the monthly association meeting?

In each case, the answer depends on what we're really trying to accomplish—the why.

It Motivates

Let's face it: if there's no good reason to be doing something, it's not worth doing.

I'm often stunned by how many people have forgotten why they're doing what they're doing—and by how quickly a simple question like "Why are you doing that?" can get them back on track.

It Clarifies Focus

When you land on the real purpose for anything you're doing, it makes things clearer.

Just taking two minutes and writing out your primary reason for doing something invariably creates an increased sharpness of vision, much like bringing a telescope into focus.

Frequently, projects and situations that have begun to feel scattered and blurred grow clearer when someone brings it back home by asking, "What are we really trying to accomplish here?"

It Expands Options

Paradoxically, even as purpose brings things into pinpoint focus, it opens up creative thinking about wider possibilities.

When you really know the underlying "why"—for the conference, for the staff party, for the elimination of the management position, or for the merger—it expands your thinking about how to make the desired result happen:

When people write out their purpose for a project in my seminars, they often claim it's like a fresh breeze blowing through their mind, clarifying their vision of what they're doing.

Is your purpose clear and specific enough?

If you're truly experiencing the benefits of a purpose focus—motivation, clarity, decision-making criteria, alignment, and creativity—then your purpose probably is specific enough.

But many "purpose statements" are too vague to produce such results.

"To have a good department," for example, might be too broad a goal.

After all, what constitutes a "good department"?

Is it a group of people who are highly motivated, collaborating in healthy ways, and taking
initiative?

Or is it a department that comes under budget?

In other words, if you don't really know when you've met your purpose or when you're off track, you don't have a viable directive.

The question "How will I know when this is off-purpose?" must have a clear answer.

Principles

Of equal value as prime criteria for driving and directing a project are the standards and values you hold.

Although people seldom think about these consciously, they are always there.

And if they are violated, the result will inevitably be unproductive distraction and stress.

A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence:

"I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they.. ."—what?

What policies, stated or unstated, will apply to your group's activities?

"As long as they stayed within budget"?
"satisfied the client"?
"ensured a healthy team"?
"Promoted a positive image"?

It can be a major source of stress when others engage in or allow behavior that's outside your standards.

If you never have to deal with this issue, you're truly graced.

If you do, some constructive conversation about and clarification of principles could align the energy and prevent unnecessary conflict.

You may want to begin by asking yourself, "What behavior might undermine what I'm doing, and how can I prevent it?"

That will give you a good starting point for defining your standards.

Another great reason for focusing on principles is the clarity and reference point they provide for positive conduct. How do you want or need to work with others on this project to ensure its success? You yourself are at your best when you're acting how?

Whereas purpose provides the juice and the direction, principles define the parameters of action and the criteria for excellence of behavior.

Vision/Outcome

About vision & outcome

In order to most productively to access the conscious and unconscious resources available to you, you must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like.

Purpose and principles furnish the impetus and the monitoring, but vision provides the actual blueprint of the final result.

This is the "what?" instead of the "why?"

What will this project or situation really be like when it successfully appears in the world?

For example, graduates of your seminar are demonstrating consistently applied knowledge of the subject matter.

Market share has increased 2 percent within the northeastern region over the last fiscal year.

Your daughter is clear about your guidelines and support for her first semester in college.

The Power of Focus

Since the 1960s thousands of books have expounded on the value of appropriate positive imagery and focus.

Forward-looking focus has even been a key element in Olympic-level sports training, with athletes imagining the physical effort, the positive energy, and the successful result to ensure the highest level of unconscious support for their performance.

We know that the focus we hold in our minds affects what we perceive and how we perform.

This is as true on the golf course as it is in a staff meeting or during a serious conversation with a spouse.

My interest lies in providing a model for focus that is dynamic in a practical way, especially in project thinking.

When you focus on something—the vacation you're going to take, the meeting you're about to go into, the product you want to launch—that focus instantly creates ideas and thought patterns you wouldn't have had otherwise.

Even your physiology will respond to an image in your head as if it were reality.

The Reticular Activating System

The May 1957 issue of Scientflc American contained an article describing the discovery of the reticular formation at the base of the brain.

The reticular formation is basically the gateway to your conscious awareness; it's the switch that turns on your perception of ideas and data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music's playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room.

Just like a computer, your brain has a search function—but it's even more phenomenal than a computer's. It seems to be programmed by what we focus on and, more primarily, what we identify with.

It's the seat of what many people have referred to as the paradigms we maintain.

We notice only what matches our internal belief systems and identified contexts.

If you're an optometrist, for example, you'll tend to notice people wearing eyeglasses across a crowded room; if you're a building contractor, you may notice the room's physical details.

If you focus on the color red right now and then just glance around your environment, if there is any red at all, you'll see even the tiniest bits of it.

The implications of how this filtering work show we are unconsciously made conscious of information—could fill a week long seminar.

Suffice it to say that something automatic and extraordinary happens in your mind when you create and focus on a clear picture of what you want.

Clarifying Outcomes

There is a simple but profound principle that emerges from understanding the way your perceptive filters work:

you won't see how to do it until you see yourself doing it.

It's easy to envision something happening if it has happened before or you have had experience with similar successes.

It can be quite a challenge, however, to identify with images of success if they represent new and foreign territory that is, if you have few reference points about what an event might actually look like and little experience of your own ability to make it happen.

Many of us hold ourselves back from imaging a desired outcome unless someone can show us how to get there.

Unfortunately, that's backward in terms of how our minds work to generate and recognize solutions and methods.

One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most important to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes.

This is not as self-evident as it may sound.

We need to constantly define (and redefine) what we're trying to accomplish on many different levels, and consistently reallocate resources toward getting these tasks completed as effectively and efficiently as possible.

What will this project look like when it's done?

How do you want the client to feel, and what do you want him to know and do, after the presentation?

Where will you be in your career three years from now?

How would the ideal V.P of finance do his job?

What would your Web site really look like and have as capabilities if it could be the way you wanted it?

Outcome/vision can range from:

a simple statement of the project, such as "Finalize computer-system implementation,"

to a completely scripted movie depicting the future scene in all its glorious detail.

Here are three basic steps for developing a vision:

1 View the project from beyond the completion date.

2 Envision "WILD SUCCESS"! (Suspend "Yeah, but...)

3 Capture features, aspects, qualities you imagine in place.

When I get people to focus on a successful scenario of their project, they usually experience heightened enthusiasm and think of something unique and positive about it that hadn't occurred to them before.

"Wouldn't it be great if. . ." is not a bad way to start thinking about a situation, at least for long enough to have the option of getting an answer.

Brainstorming

About brainstorming

Once you know what you want to have happen, and why, the "how" mechanism is brought into play.

When you identify with some picture in your mind that is different from your current reality, you automatically start filling in the gaps, or brainstorming.

Ideas begin to pop into your head in somewhat random order—little ones, big ones, not-so-good ones, good ones.

This process usually goes on internally for most people about most things, and that's often sufficient.

For example, you think about what you want to say to your boss as you're walking down the hall to speak to her.

But there are many other instances when writing things down, or capturing them in some external way, can give a tremendous boost to productive output and thinking.

Capturing Your Ideas

Over the last few decades, a number of graphics-oriented brainstorming techniques have been introduced to help develop creative thinking about projects and topics.

They've been called things like mind-mapping, clustering, patterning, webbing, and fish-boning.

Although the authors of these various processes may portray them as being different from one another, for most of us end-users the basic premise remains the same:

give yourself permission to capture and express any idea, and then later on figure out how it fits in and what to do with it.

If nothing else (and there is plenty of "else"), this practice adds to your efficiency—when you have the idea, you grab it, which means you won't have to go "have the idea" again.

The most popular of these techniques is called mindmapping, a name coined by Tony Buzan, a British researcher in brain functioning, to label this process of brainstorming ideas onto a graphic format.

In mind-mapping, the core idea is presented in the center, with associated ideas growing out in a somewhat free-form fashion around it.

For instance, if I found out that I had to move my office, I might think about computers, changing my business cards, all the connections I'd have to change, new furniture, moving the phones, purging and packing, and soon. If I captured these thoughts graphically it might start to look something like this:

You could do this kind of mind-mapping on Post-its that could be stuck on a whiteboard, or you could input ideas into a word processor or outlining program on the computer.

Distributed Cognition

The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn't have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you.

It's as if your mind were to say,

"Look, I'm only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use.

If you're not collecting them in some trusted way, I won't give you that many.

But if you're actually doing something with the ideas—even if it's just recording them for later evaluation—then here, have a bunch!

And, oh wow! That reminds me of another one, and another," etc.
Psychologists are beginning to label this and similar processes "distributed cognition."

It's getting things out of your head and into objective, reviewable formats.

But my English teacher in high school didn't have to know about the theory to give me the key: "David," he said, "you're going to college, and you're going to be writing papers. Write all your notes and quotes on separate three-by-five cards.

Then, when you get ready to organize your thinking, just spread them all out on the floor, see the structure, and figure out what you're missing."

Mr. Edmundson was teaching me a major piece of the natural planning model!

Few people can hold their focus on a topic for more than a couple of minutes, without some objective structure and tool or trigger to help them.

Pick a big project you have going right now and just try to think of nothing else for more than sixty seconds.

This is pretty hard to do unless you have a pen and paper in hand and use those "cognitive artifacts" as the anchor for your ideas.

Then you can stay with it for hours.

That's why good thinking can happen while you're working on a computer document about a project, mind-mapping it on a legal pad or on a paper tablecloth in a hip restaurant, or just having a meeting about it with other people in a room that allows you to hold the context (a whiteboard with nice' wet markers really helps there, too).

Brainstorming Keys

Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out-of-the-box thinking. The basics principles, however, can be summed up as follows:

Don't Judge, Challenge, Evaluate, or Criticize

It's easy for the unnatural planning model to rear its ugly head in brainstorming, making people jump to premature evaluations and critiques of ideas.

If you care even slightly about what a critic thinks, you'll censure your expressive process as you look for the "right" thing to say.

There's a very subtle distinction between keeping brainstorming on target with the topic and stifling the creative process.

It's also important that brainstorming be put into the overall context of the planning process, because if you think you're doing it just for its own sake, it can seem trite and inappropriately off course.

If you can understand it instead as something you're doing right now, for a certain period, before you move toward a resolution at the end, you'll feel more comfortable giving this part of the process its due.

This is not to suggest that you should shut off critical thinking, though—everything ought to be fair game at this stage. It's just wise to understand what kinds of thoughts you're having and to park them for use in the most appropriate way. The primary criterion must be expansion, not contraction.

Go for Quantity, Not Quality

Going for quantity keeps your thinking expansive.

Often you won't know what's a good idea until you have it.

And sometimes you'll realize it's a good idea, or the germ of one, only later on.

You know how shopping at a big store with lots of options lets you feel comfortable about your choice?

The same holds true for project thinking.

The greater the volume of thoughts you have to work with, the better the context you can create for developing options and trusting your choices.

Put Analysis and Organization in the Background

Analysis and evaluation and organization of your thoughts should be given as free a rein as creative out-of-the-box thinking.

But in the brainstorming phase, this critical activity should not be the driver.

Making a list can be a creative thing to do, a way to consider the people who should be on your team, the customer requirements for the software, or the components of the business plan.

Just make sure to grab all that and keep going until you get into the weeding and organizing of focus that make up the next stage.

Organizing

About organizing

If you've done a thorough job of emptying your head of all the things that came up in the brainstorming phase, you'll notice that a natural organization is emerging.

As my high school English teacher suggested, once you get all the ideas out of your head and in front of your eyes, you'll automatically notice natural relationships and structure.

This is what most people are referring to when they talk about "project plans."

Organizing usually happens when you identify components and subcomponents, sequences or events, and/or priorities.

What are the things that must occur to create the final result?

In what order must they occur?

What is the most important element to ensure the success of the project?

This is the stage in which you can make good use of structuring tools ranging from:

informal bullet points, scribbled literally on the back of an envelope,

to project planning software like Microsoft Project

When a project calls for substantial objective control, you'll need some type of hierarchical outline with components and subcomponents, and/or a GANTT-type chart showing stages of the project laid out over time, with independent and dependent parts and milestones identified in relationship to the whole.

Creative thinking doesn't stop here; it just takes another form. Once you perceive a basic structure, your mind will start trying to "fill in the blanks."

Identifying three key things that you need to handle on the project, for example, may cause you to think of a fourth and a fifth when you see them all lined up.

The Basics of Organizing

The key steps here are:

Identify the significant pieces.

Sort by (one or more):

components

sequences

priorities

Detail to the required degree.

I have never seen any two projects that needed to have exactly the same amount of structure and detail developed in order to get things off people's minds and moving successfully. But almost all projects can use some form of creative thinking from the left side of the brain, along the lines of "What's the plan?"

Next Actions

About Next Actions

The final stage of planning comes down to decisions about the allocation and reallocation of physical resources to actually get the project moving.

The question to ask here is, "What's the next action?"

As we noted in the previous chapter, this kind of grounded, reality-based thinking, combined with clarification of the desired outcome, forms the critical component of knowledge work.

In my experience, creating a list of what your real projects are and consistently managing your next action for each one will constitute 90 percent of what is generally thought of as project planning.

This "runway level" approach will make you "honest" about all kinds of things:

Are you really serious about doing this?

Who's responsible?

Have you thought things through enough?

At some point, if the project is an actionable one, this next action decision must be made.*

*You can also plan nonactionable projects and not need a next action—for example, designing your dream house. The lack of a next action by default makes it a "someday/maybe" project... and that's fine for anything of that nature.

Answering the question about what specifically you would do about something physically if you had nothing else to do will test the maturity of your thinking about the project.

If you're not yet ready to answer that question, you have more to flesh out at some prior level in the natural planning sequence.

The Basics

Decide on next actions for each of the current moving parts of the project.

Decide on the next action in the planning process, if necessary.

Activating the 'Moving Parts"

A project is sufficiently planned for implementation when every next-action step has been decided on every front that can actually be moved on without some other component's having to be completed first.

If the project has multiple components, each of them should be assessed appropriately by asking, "Is there something that anyone could be doing on this right now?"

You could be coordinating speakers for the conference, for instance, at the same time that you're finding the appropriate site.

In some cases there will be only one aspect that can be activated, and everything else will depend on the results of that.

So there may be only one next action, which will be the linchpin for all the rest.

More to Plan?

What if there's still more planning to be done before you can feel comfortable with what's next?

There's still an action step—it is just a process action.

What's the next step in the continuation of planning?

• Drafting more ideas.
• Emailing Ana Maria and Sean to get their input.
• Telling your assistant to set up a planning meeting with the product team.

The habit of clarifying the next action on projects, no matter what the situation, is fundamental to you staying in relaxed control.

When the Next Action Is Someone Else...

If the next action is not yours, you must nevertheless clarify whose it is (this is a primary use of the "Waiting For" action list).

In a group-planning situation, it isn't necessary for everyone to know what the next step is on every part of the project.

Often all that's required is to allocate responsibility for parts of the project to the appropriate persons and leave it up to them to identify next actions on their particular pieces.

This next-action conversation forces organizational clarity.

Issues and details emerge that don't show up until someone holds everyone's "feet to the fire" about the physical-level reality of resource allocation.

It's a simple, practical discussion to foster, and one that can significantly stir the pot and identify weak links.