40,000 Feet: Three-to Five-Year Vision Projecting three to five years into the future generates thinking about bigger categories: organization strategies, environmental trends, career and life-transition circumstances. Internal factors include longer-term career, family, and financial goals and considerations. Outer-world issues could involve changes affecting your job and organization, such as technology, globalization, market trends, and competition. Decisions at this altitude could easily change what your work might look like on many levels.
50, 000+ Feet Life This is the "big picture" view. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? The primary purpose for any-thing provides the core definition of what its "work" really is. It is the ultimate job description. All the goals, visions, objectives, projects, and actions derive from this, and lead toward it.
These altitude analogies are somewhat arbitrary, and in real life the important conversations you will have about your focus and your priorities may not fit exactly to one horizon or another. They can provide a useful framework, however, to remind you of the multilayered nature of your "job" and resulting commitments and tasks.
Obviously, many factors must be considered before you feel comfortable that you have made the best decision about what to do and when. "Setting priorities" in the traditional sense of focus ing on your long-term goals and values, though obviously a necessary core focus, does not provide a practical framework for a vast majority of the decisions and tasks you must engage in day to day. Mastering the flow of your work at all the levels you experience that work provides a much more holistic way to get things done, and feel good about it.
Part 2 of this book will provide specific coaching about how to use these three models for making action choices, and how the best practices for collecting, processing, planning, organizing, and reviewing all contribute to your greatest success with them.
3. Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning
THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are (1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. This is what I call horizontal focus. Al though it may seem simple, the actual application of the process can create profound results.
You've got to think about the big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.
— Alvin Toffler
Horizontal focus is all you'll need in most situations, most of the time. Sometimes, however, you may need greater rigor and focus to get a project under control, to identify a solution, or to ensure that all the right steps have been deter mined. This is where vertical focus comes in. Knowing how to think productively in this more "vertical" way and how to integrate the results into your personal system is the second powerful behavior set needed for knowledge work.
The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas.
This kind of thinking doesn't have to be elaborate. Most of the thinking you'll need to do is informal, what I call back-of-the-envelope planning — the kind of thing you do literally on the back of an envelope in a coffee shop with a colleague as you're hashing out the agenda and structure of a sales presentation. In my experience this tends to be the most productive kind of planning you can do in terms of your output relative to the energy you put into it. True, every once in a while you may need to develop a more formal structure or plan to clarify components, sequences, or priorities. And more detailed outlines will also be necessary to coordinate more complex situations — if teams need to collaborate about various project pieces, for example, or if business plans need to be drafted to convince an investor you know what you're doing. But as a general rule, you can be pretty creative with nothing more than an envelope and a pencil.
The greatest need I've seen in project thinking in the professional world is not for more formal models; usually the people who need those models already have them or can get them as part of an academic or professional curriculum. Instead, I've found the biggest gap to be the lack of a project-focusing model for "the rest of us." We need ways to validate and support our thinking, no matter how informal. Formal planning sessions and high-horsepower planning tools (such as project software) can certainly be useful, but too often the participants in a meeting will need to have another meeting — a back-of-the-envelope session — to actually get a piece of work fleshed out and under control. More formal and structured meetings also tend to skip over at least one critical issue, such as why the project is being done in the first place. Or they don't allow adequate time for brainstorming, the development of a bunch of ideas nobody's ever thought about that would make the project more interesting, more profitable, or just more fun. And finally, very few such meetings bring to bear sufficient rigor in determining action steps and accountabilities for the various aspects of a project plan.
The good news is, there is a productive way to think about projects, situations, and topics that creates maximum value with minimal expenditure of time and effort. It happens to be the way we naturally think and plan, though not necessarily the way we normally plan when we consciously try to get a project under control. In my experience, when people do more planning, more informally and naturally, they relieve a great deal of stress and obtain better results.
The Natural Planning Model
You're already familiar with the most brilliant and creative planner in the world: your brain. You yourself are actually a planning-machine. You're planning when you get dressed, eat lunch, go to the store, or simply talk. Although the process may seem somewhat random, a quite complex series of steps in fact has to occur before your brain can make anything happen physically. Your mind goes through five steps to accomplish virtually any task:
The most experienced planner in the world is your brain.
1 Defining purpose and principles
2 Outcome visioning
3 Brainstorming
4 Organizing
5 Identifying next actions
A Simple Example: Planning Dinner Out
The last time you went out to dinner, what initially caused you to think about doing it? It could have been any number of things — the desire to satisfy hunger, socialize with friends, celebrate a special occasion, sign a business deal, or develop a romance. As soon as any of these turned into a real inclination that you wanted to move on, you started planning. Your intention was your purpose,and it automatically triggered your internal planning process.Your principles created the boundaries of your plan. You probably didn't consciously think about your principles regarding going out to dinner, but you thought within them: standards of food and service, affordability, convenience, and comfort all may have played a part. In any case, your purpose and principles were the defining impetus and boundaries of your planning.
Once you decided to fulfill your purpose, what were your first substantive thoughts? Probably not "point II.A.3.b. in plan." Your first ideas were more likely things like "Italian food at Giovanni's," or "Sitting at a sidewalk table at the Bistro Cafe." You probably also imagined some positive picture of what you might experience or how the evening would turn out — maybe the people involved, the atmosphere, and/or the outcome. That was your outcome visioning. Whereas your purpose was the why of your going out to dinner, your vision was an image of the what—of the physical world's looking, sounding, and feeling the ways that best fulfilled your purpose.