3 severe consequences of poor planning...

Three severe consequences of poor planning three severe consequences, you would think if there were severe consequences for things, then people would take action to ensure that they don't experience those severe consequences.

And this has been documented in a wonderful phrase called the five P's, you may have heard it, prior planning prevents poor performance, sometimes there's an extra Padded.

And you may be familiar with that one as well.

But the idea here is that planning prevents poor performance, that if you plan, you'll get good performance.

And I want to list out these three consequences for you.

Okay, number one, number one, you've got a sequencing error, okay? Now, if you don't plan, then you are likely to put things in the wrong order, something had to be done first before a second thing, that second thing got done, and it has now ruined the first thing, this could be very severe, this is a severe consequence, this happens, it may not be easy to acquire the materials required to have a second go, in fact, in some situations is just not possible.

You only get one shot, and that's it.

The second type of severe consequence, then what to sorry, timing errors, mean timing errors, okay, so something has a time either to complete a process or to wait before the next process and that timing is not known.

It's not documented, there's no planning put into it.

And so the timing gets messed up.

Now, not all things will have this, but some will.

And if you don't know about the timing, and you don't document it, or you don't track the time, okay, that process has finished and now this one can begin, then you may run into significant severe consequences.

It might be, how long does it take for the concrete to dry before it's safe to actually put the building on, you go too early.

And suddenly, we've got a problem, you go too late.

There are no severe consequences, other than everything starts to get blown out from a time perspective, because you knew it was ready at 24.

But you weren't sure.

So you had to allow another day.

And that's a whole day behind on the project.

The third one, targeting errors, targeting errors.

So what am I talking about here? Well, I'm talking about not knowing what the final target is.

So not being clear on that I will just kind of hit in that general direction, your chances of pulling that off in terms of a successful project, or a successful enterprise and very small.

But this could also be seen as if we know the final target.

But what are the interim targets? What are the milestones that have to be hit? Without planning? They may be not documented? There's no comparison.

So how are we on track, this will come into play in bigger projects.

If there's a 12-month project, and you have nothing except that final 12-month target, it's highly likely that you will be off course and you'll have no way to judge that.

So this idea of having the final target set, what are we going for, and then coming back and setting milestone targets as well to make sure that you're on track.

Now, the interesting thing is generally, the further you are down the actual implementation, and you start to make changes, the more expensive it is.

So if you're almost finished, or in fact, you actually finished, and then you change your mind, it will cost a lot of money to go and fix that error.

I have had this happen.

This happened in my family.

Amazingly, there was a bathroom renovation that was completed, like literally completed.

And one of my family members who should remain unspoken came in and said don't like it, tear it out, do it this way.

And I don't know how that was taken by my father.

I'm pretty sure my father was like, What the heck just happened here.

I don't even understand why we didn't get to use it for like a couple of days, at least maybe a week, maybe two weeks.

Maybe it would resolve but you can see the problem of not having the final target.

It would have been far better to have designs done plans done to look at and say okay, yeah, I can see how this is going to work or identification of problems at that stage.

Let's rejig it, let's reject the space.

And I wanted to bring your attention to two particular areas and there's probably a whole lot more where the severe consequences have led to massive investment in planning.

Can you know what the first one is? The first one is architecture and the entire profession devoted to the planning of buildings.

Why? Because as you build a building, if you get it wrong, you have to tear the whole thing down to get it right.

Very excited.

It's far cheaper to invest into those blueprints done by the architect.

Second one.

Second one is prototyping for software.

There is a whole industry of amazing tools now, that will build high definition highly realistic models have the software.

Why? Because if you do not have those, and then you go develop and start to have to fix the problems in development, it's all vastly more expensive than if you fix them in prototyping.

So there are just two examples.

Yet what's curious to me is in business, not so much, not so much.

And I have thought about this.

I was like, you know, why is that? Why? Why are businesses are often very driven by getting things done? Even if it's the wrong things, you're like, Yes, we did our 12-hour work, we did a 14 hour day.

But it wasn't the right thing, or it caused more problems.

And now you've got 20 hours of work to correct the 12, which could have been done in three if the planning had been done.

One particular example is the building out of new products, everyone's very excited, they're like a new product, we're going to make lots of money, let's go make the product.

And then they run into the first problem, which is how are we going to sell this? And then the selling begins? It's like, okay, well, I have a good workout, how to sell this thing.

But a lot of work already went into the product.

And so if it does not sell, then the whole of the investment cycle is wasted.

This led to I suppose lean trial, a Lean software development, lean manufacturing, where it's like, Okay, let's get something out there minimum viable product, see whether it works.

If it works, great, we can go from there.

So there has been working done.

But overall, it would have been really good.

If we thought with BluePrints For Business, if we're like, Okay, what's the plan because the investment must be done for the plan to be implemented.

And if we're going to implement the right plan, or at least a plan that's been thought through that is complete, then this offers the business that invests in planning a significant advantage.

Now, they might not be as fast as a business that just goes for it.

And by some miracle, some stroke of the gods, and they get through the entire experience without making any major errors, then they will have a time advantage over the business that planned.

But the chances of this are relatively small, the number of errors that can happen, when you're looking at building a product, building a sales funnel, building, the ads, building, the customer experience, all of these things need to be thought of in order to ensure that you do not have a grating experience as the prospect comes through the sales experience.

Perhaps they've seen an ad and that ad doesn't line up with the sales experience.

And then the salesperson doesn't seem to be talking about the same thing that you signed up for.

And then perhaps you still buy like, okay, look, it sounds pretty good, I'll buy, but then the product is different.

And then there is no handover from the salesperson to the customer, fulfillment people, and they have to ask all of the questions again.

And then it's like, okay, this, this is a lot of effort.

This is very expensive to do all of this to not have at work.

But with good blueprints with good planning.

All of this can be avoided, and it is far better.

Just like in architecture, just like in software development, that investment in planning pays off massively.

So have a look at your business and think about the last significant investment that you made into any of those areas, your ads, your sales, funnels, your fulfillment, and was it done with plants? And was it done particularly with consistent plans across all three of those areas? I'm going to leave you with that thought.

Businesses that plan, do a whole lot more profit.

Thanks for tuning in today.

I certainly enjoyed making this.

I hope you got a lot of value from it.

I'd be taking some lessons here in terms of Oh right.

I'm getting how to think and do the work in planning so that it shows up in a lie execution that happens step by step by step the right things in the right order with the right timing to hit the targets and result in one final thing, which is profit.

All right.

I look forward to seeing tomorrow's episode as we continue this journey into the power of systems that create results.

I'll see you then.