Five mistakes organisations make in autumn planning cycles

Autumn is when most organisations run their annual planning cycle. It is also when most of them make the same structural mistakes they made the previous year, because the mistakes are embedded in the process rather than in the people. This article covers the five most common ones, based on planning sessions Oliver Mercer has observed and facilitated since 2019.

Mistake one: confusing planning with deciding ¶

Planning sessions often produce plans without producing decisions. The group agrees on priorities in the room, but nobody has actually decided anything in the sense of committing to a specific course of action with a specific owner. The plan exists as a document. The decisions that would make it real have not been made.

The fix is to end every planning session with a decision register: a list of the specific decisions that need to be made, who will make them, and by when. Not a list of actions. A list of decisions.

Mistake two: planning for the organisation you wish you had ¶

Annual plans are frequently built on assumptions about capacity, capability, and resources that do not reflect the actual organisation. The plan assumes the new hire will be in post by February. It assumes the system migration will be complete by March. It assumes the team will have bandwidth for a new initiative alongside their existing workload.

A useful discipline is to build the plan against the organisation as it is today, then add a separate section for the plan as it would be if specific conditions are met. That separation makes the assumptions visible and testable.

Mistake three: no mechanism for updating the plan ¶

Most annual plans are built in October and reviewed in December, by which point they are already out of date. The organisations that get the most value from their planning process build in a structured review at the end of each quarter, with a specific question: what has changed that requires a decision about the plan?

That question is different from 'how are we tracking against the plan?' The first question treats the plan as a living document. The second treats it as a fixed target.

What to do differently this autumn ¶

The single most useful change is to separate the planning session from the decision-making session. Run the planning conversation first, then schedule a follow-up session specifically to make the decisions the planning conversation surfaced. That separation gives people time to think between the two, and it prevents the planning session from collapsing into a decision-making session before the options have been properly explored.

The planning cycle is one of the most reliable opportunities an organisation has to improve its decision-making. Most organisations use it to produce a document instead.