Get proactive with your company’s future.
Nobody wants the future to happen to them. But Planning is often challenging.
That’s because many leadership teams struggle to draft compelling, realistic Plans in the first place. And many struggle to bring those drafted Plans to life.
Most people were never taught how to do either.
ALIGN’s Proactive Mode Planning enables you to draft your Plans, and bring them to life, with less stress and more effectiveness … in a way that captures and preserves your company’s magic (something that’s sadly missing from most approaches to planning).
Here’s how Proactive Mode Planning works:
A new, quarterly rhythm of clarity
We begin with a day dedicated to drafting your company’s Plan,
beginning with The Dream,
and rewinding back to a 1K Sprint (roughly 3 years),
a 12-Month Plan,
and 3-Month Rocks.
The Planning begins in the context of your company’s Identity, and it welcomes each participant to imagine what differences will best bring your Identity to life through the Plan. We get specific down to each meaningful part of what your company is up to (or should be up to).
Your Plan then gets teed up as a shared, digital document so you can act it into being one quarter at a time, and update it at the end of each quarter.
Then the process repeats with an Annual Planning Day one year later.
Supporting your quarterly progress & updates
The goal is to bring your Plan to life 90 days at a time, so the 3-Month Rocks become the focus of your work, through what we call “Captaining.”
Four sets of 3-Month Rocks across each year, punctuated by three Quarterly Updates for your Plan.
During the months in between your Annual Planning Days, we offer the following support options:
Video guidance on how to run your own Quarterly Updates, and how to get unstuck when you’re Captaining a Rock
Facilitation for your Quarterly Updates
Coaching availability for your Captains, to keep your Plan unstuck and moving forward during each quarter
Frequently Asked Questions:
Why is it called Proactive Mode Planning?
Because most organizations find themselves in Reactive Mode, by accident — which is responding, as best you can, to what’s coming at you.
Proactive Mode is taking the lead, taking the initiative, and doing the reasonable work that moves your organization forward.
We’re new to Planning. Will this be overwhelming?
Almost certainly no. Our approach turns Planning into an interesting conversation, one that ends up creating an incredibly useful outcome: a Plan we can bring to life next.
What does the Plan look like, after an Annual Planning Day (or Quarterly Update)?
We typically share the Plan back to you as a Google Sheet with edit access for your team’s Captains. This format makes it simple to access and update, and keeps your Plan from feeling intimidating or out of reach.
Who should we include in our Planning Day?
That’s of course up to you, but we typically a suggest a group no bigger than 15 (more than that, and some people turn invisible).
If that’s your entire company, and you like the idea of including everyone, do it! Otherwise, a company’s leadership team is often the right place to start.
Anyone else, beyond your leadership team, should get invited because of their additional perspective, and a good rule of thumb is to land on a principle (of who’s included) that you wouldn’t mind sharing with those you don’t end up including.