The crisis isn’t over and in England we are in lockdown again but for many organisations in receipt of CRF and/or other emergency funding the intense crisis management, reactive phase is coming to an end and exhausted minds are turning to recovery, adaptation and the need for a new business plan. However, there is a problem: a traditional top-down, linear approach to business planning is simply not going to produce a deliverable plan in the current context. Time spent going down this route will be time wasted.
We all need to rethink and redo planning as a more creative, collaborative and open ended activity and accept uncertainty as a fact of life not an inconvenient truth to be ignored.
To help start addressing this problem we have come up with a new planning tool: the Covid-19 planning canvas. The purpose of the canvas is simple: to pull together on one flipchart/virtual whiteboard/google doc all of the key elements that a leadership team needs to consider when developing a new plan framework to be shared with their teams and boards. This canvas is not a plan – it is template for discussing and creating a plan in collaboration with others.
There are five blocks:
Principles: what principles / values / ways of working do you want to practice during the period of your plan? These are within your control and are the most powerful levers that you can pull on to move in a different direction.
Aims: what do you want / need your key achievements to be over the lifetime of your plan? Focus on a few key areas – this is definitely a time for doing a few things well.
Key milestones: what milestones will help you plan delivery of your aims? Focus on the big achievements, levels of readiness and decisions; don’t generate to do lists at this stage.
Questions: what questions do you want / need to explore through the planning process? The job of leaders is not to have an answer to every question; it is to create an environment in which big, important and difficult questions can be tackled together.
Experiments: what ideas do you want to test during the implementation of your plan? Most organisations are going to need to do things differently but few will have the resources to fail at scale so what is needed is small, inexpensive ways to test your ideas. You can learn from them all, iterate and implement the best ones.
The framework emphasises questioning, experimentation and testing. It encourages learning and a focus on those aspects of your organisational performance that you can control or at least influence.
This approach has been developed as part of Susan’s work with the leadership team of Steve, Roy and Bryony at the Royal Exchange; we would like to thank them very much for being such enthusiastic and creative collaborators.
The canvas is a prototype designed to help solve a problem; do let us know what you think, whether you think it is helpful and how it could be improved.
Susan and Dawn