 Building a plan that holds up when it meets the real world is really hard sometimes. Today we're going to help you make it easier. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Making a plan for any project or activity that doesn't break down when it hits the real world is really difficult sometimes. Today I've got five tips for you that you can use when you're making your next plan to make it really rock solid. And stay tuned to the end we're going to have a checklist for you to make sure that you include all the elements we talk about when you're building your next plan. General Dwight D. Eisenhower said plans are useless but planning is indispensable. No matter how much time or effort we put into creating a plan when it hits the real world we're going to have to modify it a little bit or maybe throw it out entirely. To put it more simply a mentor of mine used to say you've got to have a plan before you can deviate from it. Now there's no possible way to build a plan that can plan for every possible outcome in every possible situation but the planning process will help you adapt if you do good planning will help you adapt more readily when those real-world things start to come in and affect your plan. So the military we have what's called the deliberate planning process and the tips I'm going to give you today come from the concept development stage of the military planning process the operational military planning process and I'm not going to teach you the military planning process because there's a lot of detail of that process and a lot of it probably really isn't applicable for the business world but there are some nuggets we're going to talk about today that if you include those in your plans if you make sure they're somewhere in your plans for your project your event your activity whatever it is you're going to get a lot of value out of these little nuggets. So don't get too caught up in the military planning process and aren't we following that military planning process it's not what we're really going for today what we're trying to do is pull some of these really good nuggets from the military planning process so you can incorporate them into your planning so that when your plan hits the real world and you have to start to adapt you've done some really excellent thorough planning work. Tip number one is to analyze the mission of the situation and this is typically what you want to do first when you're starting to build your plan you want to analyze the problem analyze the mission you're trying to accomplish and analyze the situation and don't go changing the format of your plan if your company has a preferred format or your organization has a preferred format for putting things in you don't need to go change that format just make sure you do this step first is to analyze what you're really trying to accomplish and we do this you've heard us talk about this in other videos we do this to the five W's who what where when why how comes later in your plan don't worry about that for now but you want to get those things you really want to emphasize who what when where why you're doing this and it's also important not just why you're doing it for yourself for your own team but who are the other stakeholders involved what are some of the constraints that those stakeholders whether that's your boss your board of directors some outside forces might place on you in the military when we do this mission analysis and the situational analysis we start to look at what the enemy might do and how the enemy might react to things in the corporate world and the business civilian or even nonprofit world you don't have an enemy but you might have some of those external forces or some differences of opinion about what you're doing and how they might need to be dealt with so think about those when you do this part of the plan as well so first thing first step whether this is the first thing you're right in your plan or not make sure what you do is you analyze this mission this situation get to those five W's and that'll set the stage for developing the rest of your plan next you've got to define your end state what is it you're really trying to accomplish here what is that outcome you're trying to achieve you can usually do this by asking the question of how do you know when the plan is done how will you know what I'm done and I can move on to something else when I was working in flight test we usually put together a list or a matrix of test points that we knew was the bare minimum set we had to accomplish or make a decision whether what we were testing had succeeded the test or failed at the test that was just the minimum number of points we had to collect that had no bearing on whether the system did his job or not but we knew we need to collect a minimum number of points and that was how we knew the test was done if we ran out of money or we ran out of time if we had collected that minimum number of points we knew we could move on to the next thing because we had enough information to make a decision later on now we also would have some goals we would have our minimum set and then we would have some goals if there were time and money we would go on and follow up and do as many of those goals as we could but make sure you define your end state make sure you create that finish line for when this plan is done tip number three is to define your intent for any plan to really succeed you need to have a very clear vision of what you want to the outcome to look like and you need to be able to communicate that outcome to others this is going a little beyond the nuts and bolts of the end state what that kind of objective was that you defined earlier now it's your vision of what does it look like feel like taste like smell like when you get there and it gives you an opportunity to give your team a little bit more information on how you want them to go forward and develop the plan and execute the plan by getting giving them some more information on what you think the outcome of this looks like beyond just the nuts and bolts of it as well as helping them set priorities setting some priorities for them and what they should place above other things in the priority list and it also lets you give them an idea for how much risk you're willing to accept in certain areas of the plan over others so in the military we call this commander's intent if you're not in the military I don't recommend you use that term but come up with some term talking about the intent of what you're doing the vision of what you're doing beyond that nuts and bolts of the end state you want to achieve to give the people on your team an ability to buy into your vision as you're working through your plan and all the great things like the end state and the intent and the outcomes and and the priorities you've got to think about logistics that go into executing this plan as well in the military this traditionally consists of moving people and resources and assets from place to place and getting them from point a to point b on time now if you're working in a digital or tech world or even in a modern ops environment you may yet need to move people and resources from point a to point b but something that's really important to consider here in the 21st century is information flows whether that's data or it's just information uh that's moving from one person in the office to another person in the office information is really how we do business in the 21st century it's it's just as important as the physical assets we deal with if not more important sometimes so it's really important to consider those information flows and is the information getting from person a to person b or point a to point b in order for the plan to succeed the last tip I have for you today is to think about branches and sequels as you develop your plans again in the military branches and sequels are very specific terms that refer to very specific things and the gist of it is that you look at what in your plan if it makes a certain set of assumptions or conditions come true can kick off somebody else's plan uh and whether that's positive or negative if the a series of positive assumptions positive conditions come about as a result of your plan or in the execution of your plan that could kick off another plan that would then go into motion that somebody else might execute or you might even execute but same thing with sequels and when you reach the successful conclusion of your plan are the conditions right to go on to something else so I don't want you to get too wrapped up in those terms and again we're not doing military planning here we're just taking some advice from military planning to try to create great project plans event plans activity plans in our own organization so don't want you to get wrapped up at the terms or trying to do this the military way I just want you to get your head wrapped around the concept that you may be working on something that if you can set the stage set the conditions for something somebody else in your organization or even your own team is doing then this plan could be something that jump starts another plan you've been wanting to get done a long time but this plan is necessary to set the conditions for so think about that idea that concept of branches and sequels as you work through your plan what other opportunities could this plan kick off depending on how the conditions and the assumptions turn out all these tips came from what we get in the military called the deliberate planning process and that's when we are sitting at home have a lot of time to plan a military operation and we're watching world events unfold unfold slowly and that's probably the condition that most of you are in in your businesses and organizations you're not in crisis mode if you ever do get into crisis mode the military has a thing called crisis action planning and the good news about that is that most of these tips are the same in crisis action planning you just do them faster and you're willing to take a little more risk and accept some less fully formed solutions in a crisis action plan so if you're in crunch time trying to get a plan done these steps don't need to take a lot of time but they're great tips to incorporate even if you're trying to work a plan in a matter of days or even just a matter of hours if you take these five tips and put these into your plan that'll make a even a quickly turned around plan much more solid as i mentioned this was not the whole military planning process it barely even scratch is a service the military planning process this is just five little nuggets that you can take and hopefully incorporate into the things you're working on the things you're planning now so that you can make them a little bit more robust if you want to learn about the military planning process you can go look up joint publication five dash o and that's i'll put a link to that in the notes below but don't don't sweat that we're not trying to teach you guys the military planners are telling you to even adopt military planning in your corporate or organizational planning i just want to give you five little tips here that can help you make your plans more robust and get to the point just like our eisenhower quote when when the plan falls apart the effective planning will help us adapt and retool and create a new plan or modify the plan on the fly to achieve the outcomes we're looking for if you found this helpful please like comment and share it with a friend or co-worker look in the description below that'll have the links we talked about in the video including the link to the checklist that'll help you incorporate all these tips into your next project plan if you have any business or leadership questions email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com or just leave a comment for us in the comments below we'd love to hear from you evilgeniusleadership.com is also where you can learn about our training and coaching programs so if you're looking for a little one-on-one work to develop your own leadership skills and style or you're looking for some work for your team to develop your team's leadership abilities as a whole we'd love to hear from you we'd love to give you a free consultation and see how we can help thanks for watching today i really appreciate it and remember the future is out there lead the way