Although most can agree that planning is important, they really don’t understand why. I often see things done one of two ways:
The people who spend countless hours planning and never doing
The people who don’t want to be like the first group, so they do without a plan
I think both are incorrect. You must plan and you must take action on the plan.
So what is the purpose of planning?
• Planning serves to give motivation to the organization. Without the direction of a solid and believable plan, workers often have nothing to commit to. The commitment comes from knowing what they are working towards and seeing it as a worthwhile investment of their time, energy and focus.
• Planning allows you to see where to allocate your resources. What new product or services are you creating that require money, time and innovation?
• When you create a plan, you subsequently create the flow of actions you are going to take. These actions can be translated into specific targets you need to hit to reach your stated goals.
• Once you have a clear plan attached to your goals, you can then begin to clarify and rationalize all the bases for decisions made all throughout the organization so that they align with the overall plan and targets.
So as you can see, creating a plan is important to the overall success of your organization, but following through on that plan will be the determining factor of whether or not you reach those goals.