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How to ensure a lack of time doesn’t ‘mash up’ your strategic plan

I just had an article published in Trinidad’s Newsday newspaper that highlighted the reasons why poor time management skills routinely mash up the best made strategic plans.

How to Ensure a Lack of Time Doesn’t “Mash Up” Your Strategic Plan

As we enter the post-festival season, many local companies embark on fresh annual and quarterly strategies that just won’t succeed. Most executives will blame “the culture” but they are mistaken: it has more to do with their ineffective use of time.

If you are an executive you may relate to the problem. During the strategic planning retreat, brainstorming sessions generate a lot of new ideas. As the activities add up you feel a subtle but distinct discomfort, especially if you happen to be more experienced. You sense that everything on the list simply cannot get done. Furthermore, you mute your own objections because of the strong pressure to be a “team player.”

The best companies determine the cost of each strategic project plus the overall budget when they do their strategic planning. The rare few, according to McKinsey & Co.’s Bevvins and De Smet, will go further and complete a time budget. Why is it needed?

Most company executives focus on financial budgets first because they believe that cash is their scarcest resource. The new strategic plan must be made practical by selecting activities with the highest ROI – a widely accepted technique.

However, near the end of a retreat, tired executives rarely go the next step, asking themselves how much time needs to be budgeted for each new activity. In the months to come, they treat time as if it’s an infinite resource. This sets their strategy up for failure from the beginning, causing the discomfort I mentioned earlier. The problem isn’t a lack of time, however. It’s a deficit of skill.

Most will turn to “time management” skills for the answer, without understanding that it’s a misnomer: time cannot really be managed. Instead, they need to learn to manage a “time demand,” defined as an individual, internal commitment to complete an action in the future. This distinction is foreign to many executives in Trinidad and beyond, but it lies at the heart of time budgeting.

As a manager you may possess a secret – your methods for managing time demands are self-taught, starting around the time you took the Common Entrance or SEA. You did so early on, giving you an edge that has played an important role in your academic, career and organizational success.

However, being better than the average Caribbean person is no great accomplishment. The data I have gathered from regional workshops shows why individual productivity is low, even as the macro-economy might be growing. With respect to time budgeting, our skills are lacking at all levels of the enterprise, but here are four things that can be done to instill a new level of rigour in the C-Suite while executing your annual strategy.

1. Gain an appreciation of your current individual and collective skills at managing time demands. Do so by completing an informed self-assessment illuminating your methods and their relationship to world-class standards. You’ll probably find some critical behaviours you merely do each day, but have never thought about before. Your profile reveals the salient gaps.

2. Create improvement goals and a plan. These are easy to build based on the prior step. If you were well-trained in order to do a self-assessment then you should be itching to close the gaps. The temptation will be to try to change too many, too quickly. Resist it and go for small steps with lots of support.

3. Collect time data. Most professionals have only a gut knowledge of how long things take. The chances are high that you have never tracked your personal time as the McKinsey authors and also Peter Drucker, the management guru, recommend. For planning purposes, this discipline can be as important as tracking expenditures. Data should be collected on a programme basis also, so that teams in your firm can determine how to make successful project plans.

4. Manage packed calendars. The gradual removal of administrative assistants from C-Suite staff complements has pushed a number of new time demands into your lap. The problem isn’t about fetching coffee, however. Now, you are forced to manage the all-important activity of planning your time-starved calendar using technology that changes from day to day.

The McKinsey research shows that the effective executive makes full use of administrative assistance to coordinate demanding schedules. This helps them to preserve time devoted to “the flow state” – their most productive times spent alone doing their best work.

In the absence of this knowledge and the supporting mechanisms, it’s no surprise that many strategic plans amount to little more than overblown wish-lists. Unless local companies take their executives’ time demand management skills seriously, it’s safe to expect disappointments at this time next year.

Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To receive a free compilation of past columns, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

Click here to read the article online.

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How to Avoid the Planning Fallacy

It’s easy to make the mistake of being too optimistic at times when it’s simply unwarranted. This fault is called the “planning fallacy” and it follows a natural human trait to project the best case, even when the evidence suggests something quite different.

We Caribbean people are well known in the rest of the world for our casual, laid-back and fun-seeking dispositions. It’s a major part of our culture – perhaps a release from centuries of slavery and indentureship. People pay thousands of dollars to enjoy this vibe in our carnivals, attractions and tourist resorts.

As distinct as this culture might be, it has a drawback: we are culturally prone to be over-optimistic. The “planning fallacy” is the embodiment of this tendency: we leave San Fernando for a meeting in Diego Martin, estimating that the trip can take as little as an hour. While it’s true that, under ideal circumstances, it’s possible for such a miracle to happen, it’s a mistake to believe that it will in fact do so. It’s a greater folly to lead someone else to expect us to be there “in an hour” especially when our timely attendance is critical.

It’s the planning fallacy at work and it undermines projects throughout the world and in our region. Here’s how we get past it.

1. Use Past Data

We fool ourselves into thinking that this particular trip to town is different than the three we made last month, and therefore will take less time. After all, we argue, the conditions are different; prior obstacles are unlikely to recur. Plus, we have learned a few lessons that will make things better this time around.

The research shows, however, that past data is the best predictor. At the very least, we must look for anecdotal facts as a starting point, before making projections we fall in love with that are, in fact, just plain crazy.

To prevent this from happening, seek independent verification for task estimates. Ask someone else how long it takes the average person to make the trip, or complete the task. If someone is making you a promise, ask them how long a similar task took in the recent past. Listen carefully to both the words given in the answer and the tone of their voice. Then, make your own determination.

2. Ask for Unbiased Estimates

An unbiased estimate is simply one that has an even, 50-50 chance of taking place. For example, the odds of getting 10 Heads in a row when flipping the average coin 10 times are extremely small. Most trips each day from San Fernando to Diego Martin during daytime hours take almost 2 hours – it’s the rare, one-off trip that may take only an hour. Perhaps 1 out of 50.

When you ask your colleagues to make estimates, never take the first one offered. Instead, test it. Ask them “I hear you say 10 days, but do you mean 10 days plus or minus 2 or 3 days on either side, late or early?” If they demur and tell you that there’s no way the deliverable can be early, then you know that they are committing the planning fallacy. They may not know how to correct the estimate, but you must do so if you hope to walk away from the conversation with a realistic idea of how long the task will take.

3. Accept Negativity

In business, we have a tendency to over-value the person with a can-do attitude. The employee we prefer to work with is the one who bring us both problems and solutions, never gets depressed and infuses a team with energy. However, we go a step further and accuse those who are pessimistic of having negative attitudes – they aren’t “team-players.”

To escape the planning fallacy, however, we need to listen to the voices on both sides and accept those we don’t want to hear.

It’s a big mistake to tear down the person who expresses doubts as they are likely to be the ones who will save the project from its own hubris, and failure.

Unfortunately, this happens all the time, especially on the part of executives who “want what they want, when they want it.” The sad, failed implementation of the Obamacare website is a prime example. Middle managers did their best to keep those who  knew it wouldn’t be ready on time as far away as possible from the executives who needed to know the facts. The failure speaks for itself.

Good project management is all about recognizing and mitigating risk, but our cultural habits actually increase risks. Trinidadian managers need to factor this tendency into their estimates to avoid making ruinous, unrealistic plans.

Published in the Trinidad Newsday

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How to Implement Far-Future, Reality-Based Strategic Planning

Why should a local company bother to carve out a 30-year strategic plan? Here’s one reason: to clearly separate today’s ambitions from tomorrow’s legacy.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a sound long-term plan is built on small actions taken immediately, not on grand gestures. Here’s an example.

Jamaicans who travel to Trinidad notice a small but telling difference right away. At night, Port of Spain and its environs are “brighter.” Trinidadians who land in Jamaica at night say the same: Kingston is “darker.” This noticeable difference is not emotional but empirical: one country is an oil and gas producer, while the other is struggling to find the foreign currency needed to pay its energy bills. As a result, recession-hit Jamaicans look for reasons to turn off electricity, seeing every light left on as a huge cost.

The habit that’s developed seems like an insignificant one today in the present energy boom. An effort to be energy conscious would seem superfluous. However, a company that develops the small practices leading to energy conservation would be preparing itself for a time when Trinidad’s subsidies are removed. It would be able to accomplish goals that the average firm would not even fathom.

This is just an example of the benefit of simultaneously planning for the long term while focusing on small, frequent actions. With the right planning process, any company can project itself into the future and consider the kind of “what-ifs” that change the way business is done today. By taking big trends seriously, firms can use them to define a destination that inspires bold actions right away.

By contrast, RIM, the manufacturer of Blackberry smartphones, didn’t do this kind of projection. As a result, its U.S. market share plummeted from over 50% in 2009 to less than 3% today. How should your company look beyond the conventional wisdom to see future reality with greater clarity?

1. Welcome contrary views.

As the CLICO/HCU inquiry reveals, squelching contrary views is a fast track to failure. A company that suppresses alternate and uncomfortable points of view is setting itself up to fail, and it’s especially easy to do this in a growing, healthy economy. It’s much harder to introduce and encourage conflict when there is no urgent or even apparent need to do so.

One method is to introduce outsiders with sharply defined opinions to act as professional devil’s advocates. Another is to conduct interviews with participants that help them sharpen intuitions into well-articulated points of view. During the retreat, allowing difficult conversations with uncertain outcomes is an absolute requirement.

2. Look at long horizons.

It’s often almost impossible for leaders to plan and consider big short-term changes. The psychological need to feel comfortable is just too strong. However, it’s easier to look to big changes in the future. For example, the adjustments needed to thrive in an economy without subsidies are easier to see from a distance, without the sense of an immediate threat. Then, creativity becomes the driver rather than fear, allowing the executive team the freedom needed to go beyond everyday boundaries.

3. Craft adjustment strategies.

Using contrary views to look far over the horizon is not just for intellectual stimulation. The purpose is to create a specific, measurable vision that can be back-cast from the future back to today. That’s how short-term adjustments and course-corrections can become apparent. Saving energy, which might seem silly today, becomes critical when a longer horizon is seriously considered. These adjustments, if applied consistently, add up to corporate transformations.

4. Look for a legacy.

Another benefit of a long-term planning exercise is that it takes the participants away from their current crop of concerns: bonuses, pension plans and corporate ambitions. It allows them to squarely confront the legacy they are leaving behind.

Consider this fact: decades in the future, a strategic planning activity will be undertaken in which the future leaders of your company will be talking about the performance of today’s leaders. Will your team be judged as a group of wise men and women who saw what was coming and made hard sacrifices and investments in order to preserve the company’s future? Or will your team be judged as fools who fiddled while Rome was burning?

Steve Jobs insisted that the inside of an Apple machine (which only technicians would ever see) should be just as aesthetically pleasing as the outside. He taught his employees that excellence lay in the details that others overlooked, and it’s no accident that he was able to take a failing company and turn it into the world’s most valuable in just over a decade.

Companies that take the easy path are fiddling, when they should be looking for small actions driven by a vision – far beyond the sum of personal ambitions.

Published in the Trinidad Newsday.