Are Your Plans Emphasizing Hard Choices or Masking Structural Flaws?

Have you ever watched a great idea get parked... only to disappear forever?

In this practical episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson shares one of the most valuable leadership lessons of his career: why even the best ideas fail when leaders plan in the wrong sequence. Drawing from an early management experience where a mistimed planning session created budget challenges, Ed explains how one overlooked process mistake taught him the importance of aligning strategy, planning, budgeting, and execution.

Ed introduces three common planning failure modes that quietly derail organizations: failing to sequence and integrate the planning process, failing to account for all resources and work, and failing to involve the right people at the right level. He explains why planning isn't simply creating a to do list. It's the disciplined process of coordinating people, resources, timelines, priorities, and budgets to turn strategy into reality.

Listeners will learn why operational planning should always begin with predetermined commitments before projected work and new strategic initiatives, how holistic planning prevents unrealistic expectations, and why isolated planning across departments creates organizational friction instead of alignment. Ed also explains the critical role leaders play in defining clear planning processes, coaching their teams, and building systems that empower others to execute with confidence.

To make planning actionable, Ed outlines his practical Seven Step Operational Planning Framework, covering everything from establishing the planning process and briefing team leaders to integrating plans, pressure testing assumptions, securing stakeholder approval, and preparing organizations for successful execution. The result is greater accountability, stronger collaboration, and a leadership system that helps teams move from good ideas to measurable results.

Whether you're leading a department, managing a growing business, or overseeing enterprise strategy, this episode offers a practical roadmap for improving planning, aligning resources, and building a culture where great ideas don't get lost in the parking lot. Because successful execution doesn't happen by accident. It begins with a planning process designed to help people succeed.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

If you're leading a team and you feel stuck in chaos, conflict, or constant pressure, the Leadership SOP podcast is for you. And here's your host, Ed Tyson.

Speaker 0:16

Oh, I love it. Great idea. Let's put it in the parking lot. Ah, yes, the parking lot, that magical place on the whiteboard where all truly great ideas go to die. Twenty plus years ago, I had my first planning session with a dispersed team that rarely got to spend time together. I was so excited, but my excitement was giving way to humiliation. The immediate problem was this darn parking lot. It was full, full of great ideas, which weren't in the budget. Most people, including me, use parking lots as a place to park great but off-topic ideas. Hours was piling up, but not because we had too many off-topic ideas. My team wasn't focused on the wrong things. I was focused on doing the right things, but in the wrong order. This was my first year with real PL responsibility. No one had told me to do planning, but I didn't need to be told to do it to know it needed to be done. Although, it turns out maybe I could have used just a little bit of advice. I instinctively knew planning was important. It would help me get to know this team and help us weave the company's new strategy into the fibers of the year ahead. And so as the quarter started, I started a planning process. I balanced the team's schedules and we set a date. And then it happened. A grenade landed in my inbox. My hands jerked back from the keyboard, pulling the metaphorical pin and starting a countdown to my demise. The note was from our controller. It was the budget template, and I'd seen it before. I'd even helped my boss complete it. That wasn't the issue. The issue was the timing. I had two weeks to complete it. My planning session was in six. I took a deep breath and contacted the team. I let them know it would be suboptimal, but we'd get through it. Bomb diffused, problem solved, and the Medal of Valor goes to boom. Yep. It turns out I hadn't diffused that bomb after all. It just had a longer fuse than I thought. What I failed to realize when I charged ahead is that the timing wasn't just a logistical inconvenience. It was a deadly strategic mistake. Every good idea my team was having was too late, too expensive, and if I'm honest, too intimidating. Because how could I explain this to my boss? I was so sure I was ready for this new role, and here I was creating a major budget problem in my first cycle. My team's ideas were just too good. They couldn't be swept under the carpet or tabled until next year. They weren't fighting this new strategy, they were embracing it and proving how they could contribute. But man, the budget just got approved. And now I was gonna have to do all that alignment and show up with egg on my face. Something had to give, and ultimately it was my pride. After the planning session, I mustered the courage to explain my mistake to my boss, and he was kind enough to introduce me to a little slice of purgatory called the off-cycle budget request process. At the time, I was so humiliated and scared about the consequences of my mistake that I never even stopped to wonder why in the world my boss hadn't better prepared me for this. Not only did he fail to mention planning, he didn't warn me about the timing of the budget template or provide me with clear integration points into his process. Now, I don't expect I'm telling you something you don't already know. But do your leaders know it? Have you made your expectations clear? Have you defined the process, integration points, and flow? That's planning failure mode number one, failing to sequence, integrate, and communicate the planning process. In today's episode, we're going to discuss three key failure modes and seven successful steps to operational planning and budgeting. Hello, and welcome back to the Leadership SOPs podcast, your place for exploring the best thinking and best practices associated with enterprise leading. I'm your host, Ed Tyson, creator of the Leadership SOP's Methodology, Framework, and App. Obviously, I don't know your exact role and responsibilities, but I do know that when you became a leader of leaders, you became responsible for consistently and comprehensively communicating, modeling, and coaching the purpose, work, and process of leading. Consequently, our purpose when we come together like this is peeling back the layers of that responsibility, the layers of enterprise leadership. Not the soft stuff that helps you and your leaders do it better, but the hard work of leading that is always expected, but almost never explained. We'll get to the real meaning of ubiquitous terms everyone pretends they understand, but few have really contemplated deeply enough to be able to share them with others. All for the purposes of helping you refine your mindset and your playbook, positioning you to more easily transfer that knowledge and your leadership SOPs to the leaders you lead. For my sake and yours, I divide the work of leading into three simple areas: structuring, operating, and perfecting communities of effort. To structure them, you scope the work. To operate them, you set the pace. To perfect them, you develop the might. And my advice to you, whether you ever listen to another word that leaves my mouth, is to unpack the meaning of those three verbs and sentences and build and share SOPs to pursue them. Because these three domains, structure, operate, and perfect, are the work of leading. When you act in service of these leadership functions, you are in the process of leading where all leading occurs. Because leadership is fundamentally active and fundamentally a process. So if you send your leaders to leadership training, or you do it yourself, they must express what they learn in that training in the process of leading. Otherwise, they aren't using that information, those insights to lead. Because so few understand this, so few improve their leading. In a very real sense, if we don't help leaders explore this work and establish their process for doing it, their leadership SOPs, it becomes our failure, not theirs. In the last two episodes, we explored how to structure your community of effort. Effectively, that journey through those nine dimensions took us from determining the highest level why, what, and how to establishing an operating model and organizational design. And now we have arrived at the doorstep of the operate domain, where we'll ask how again, more precisely, how, how much, who, and when. Just as I used the phrase scope the work to remember those nine dimensions of the structure domain, I use the phrase set the pace to remember the three most important dimensions of operating a community of effort. They are planning, accountability, and stakeholder engagement. Today we're gonna dive into operational planning, connecting the strategies in our scope and the implications of our work design to a holistic and coordinated resource schedule. But before I do, I want to pause right here and speak directly to any acronym fatigue you might be experiencing. If you don't like acronyms, don't pay attention to them. Don't even try to remember them. But here's the plain truth. I can almost guarantee you cannot remember this stuff without the mnemonics. I know because I couldn't either. And I had the benefit of studying and practicing organizational development for 20 plus years before I pulled this stuff together. The plain truth is without a practical way to organize, sequence, and recall the information, I needed slides, handouts to recall, sequence, teach, and coach it. And here's the deal: in a very real sense, we are both professional coaches. We both get paid to develop and guide leaders who are in position right now. I'm not talking about spotting and growing future talent. Your leaders are leading. My clients are already leading. They're in role and accountable for work they are capable of, but don't truly, truly know, not yet. So we, we both need to know this cold backwards and forwards. And again, you don't have to embrace my perspective. That's not the point. Point is not my framework, but you do need to have a perspective on these things. You do need to routinize and sequence the work. Because here's another truth. The personal failure I confessed at the start of the show wasn't fully mine. Not really. My very well-meaning and otherwise very effective enterprise leader failed me. He didn't embrace his duty, and so I didn't fully understand mine. I had intuitively identified the work to plan, but I didn't understand the system I was in and the sequence I needed to pursue to have a successful process. That story is a good reminder that from the outset, we've actually been doing two things together in our discussions. We've been simultaneously defining the work and sequencing it. For example, we talked about what scope alignment is and then how to sequence the conversation. We discuss the outputs of that process, how they flow into and inform your work design. And by now, if not before, it should be clear that both that scope that you developed and the work design should precede and then flow into your operational planning. Now, of course, life is a lot messier than theory, so downstream conclusions can and will change or refine upstream ones. But respecting the overall flow means uncovering why it was missed upstream, adding it back in, and making sure that it flows all the way downstream. Furthermore, new leaders often don't start at the beginning of a planning cycle, and they almost never call an all-stop to devise new scopes and design the work and create a new plan. No, we of course expect them to respect the current operational cadence and figure out how to get to that body of work as soon as possible and without any undue operational disruption. But do we help them? Do we tell them? Do we show them? Planning is another word which has lost much of its meaning in its ubiquity. We assume our leaders know how to plan. We assume they know all the reasons we need a plan. It almost feels absurd to consider they might not know what a plan is, doesn't it? Can your leaders define it though? Can they really? Unless you've defined it for them, you've heard them repeat it back in their own words and you've seen it in their well-sequenced actions, the only prudent course is to assume they can't and they won't. Personally, the closest I ever got to training on this subject is participating in my leaders' planning processes, the ones who actually did it. How did you learn it? How are you helping your team learn it? Leading up to this episode, I only talked to one leader, one executive who had any formal training on planning. And they had been through project management professional training earlier in their career. So for the purposes of this discussion, I realized I needed to dig a little deeper into the subject than I had before. One thing I learned as a philosophy student is understanding the purpose of a thing reveals a lot about the thing itself. So what is the purpose of planning? Why do we plan? Well, what we lead, as we've discussed before, is a community of effort. The will to act, the will to exude the effort is the glue holding our community together. No will or no choice equals no community at all. But will and effort, absent coordination, equals not enough leading. No will equals no leading, but importantly, all the will in the world is just not enough. It is not enough for them to be willing. Sure, where there's a will, there's a way, but it's the leader's job to help find the way. The purpose of a plan, then, at least the kind of operational planning we're talking about here, is to align on, coordinate, and empower the effort, determining the resource requirements and the expected returns. Therefore, planning, the act of planning, is the process of scheduling the effort and all of the resources required and generated to pursue the strategies, shape the culture, achieve objectives, realize a purpose, and serve the ecosystem all within the structure of the work design. What is it going to take? When will it happen? Who will do what? And who will they do it with? And most importantly, at what cost and for what benefit? This activity doesn't start with the exciting new work your leaders are often ready to jump into. All of that transformative stuff of their dreams, the stuff they just can't wait to sell you on. Planning begins by recognizing what has already been predetermined and committed to. The stuff we already know the what and the when, and that really can't be changed. Not at your leader's level, maybe yours, maybe even higher than yours. The effort and resources associated with this stuff is 100% structural. They have no choice whether to do it or when to do it. And so it needs to go into the plan so everything else can fill in around it. Of course, beyond this, there is some fuzzier stuff, which you know is gonna happen, and you probably can't control whether or not it happens. You just don't know how much of it is gonna happen. But you can project it, like customer sales, support requests from other departments, that kind of stuff. Unlike the predetermined effort, the projected effort often contains some variables your leaders can control, and of course, some they can't. Both of these types of efforts, though, the predetermined and the projected effort, need to get pulled into that plan early and holistically to include the resources they will require, when they will require them, and the benefits that they will provide. Understanding these two things together helps your leaders determine how much capacity there is for their strategic choices, that transformational stuff they are proposing in their scope and work designs. These are the activities they choose to do with the available time and bandwidth left after the predetermined and projected efforts and resources have been scheduled. These choices must be pressure tested, not on their merits alone, but on the available capacity to pursue it. Therefore, this order, predetermined, then projected, and then the proposed stuff, isn't a random sequence. It is required. It's needed to reality check the plan. And that check can't be performed if your leaders don't take a holistic approach, pulling all of this in, making sure it's scheduled, making sure the full amount of resources are contemplated. If they hit the easy button by focusing only on the new stuff, the newly proposed efforts, the sexy, transformational stuff, and then schedule that, absent the limitations of the former, more rigid operational constraints, they have a wish list, not a plan. And you, you will have no ability to evaluate the feasibility of that wish list, to guide it, to see where you need to change the game, to create new possibilities, new capabilities. Is their plan too aggressive? Are they sandbagging a bit? Are the right choices being made with the right resources available? It's impossible to know if the planning hasn't been done right. It's an elementary rule of planning. It's quite literally the most common and painful mistake I see executives make with respect to managing planning across their organizations. Well, that and allowing the planning process itself to remain psilotic or separated between your leaders. If your leaders strategize alone and plan alone, each will optimize their own scope and in so doing, suboptimize yours. The approach has to be holistic from start to finish. Your SOPs for planning must dovetail into theirs. So failure mode number one was failing to sequence and integrate the planning process. And failure mode number two is failing to consider all the effort and all the resources. But I promised three, didn't I? So three, which we haven't discussed yet, is failing to plan at the right level with the right level. Planning at the senior level should create and schedule the work breakdown structure, the relevant chunks of effort and resources, and identify key leads. But the details can't come from the top. They have to come from the people closest to the work and responsible for managing that part of the plan. Their job then is to pressure test the higher level points with the realities only they know. There is often a powerful loop here that can help even pressure test your entire work design and scope. And getting this part of the planning right, getting this level of involvement isn't just about empowering those who are closest to the work. It's also about reducing the burden after the planning is done for change management and communication. Leaders who skip this advice and don't engage enough, deeply enough in the organization end up discovering fatal flaws with their strategy, budget, and timelines after everything is set and there is very little wiggle room. Trust me, planning at the right level, with the right level will be just as useful to you as it is your leaders and their teams. Now, because planning is a detailed process, planning SOPs tend to be highly customized to every organization, their culture, and focus. But if I were to break it down to just seven steps, it would be this. Step one, establish a planning process, align up on timeline roles, decision making, and key assumptions. Then brief your leads, communicate key expectations, constraints, tools, and relevant scope, work, and budget assumptions. Then decentralize drafting. Assign high-level planning components to the leaders who will own them. Number four, provide individual coaching, ensure progress, momentum, and integration. Five, integrate your draft to maintain alignment. Bring the leads back together to discuss progress, questions, collaboration points, and strategic trade-offs. Pressure test and finalize those drafts. Pressure test them up, down, and across the organization as much as permissible and practical. Then, number seven, secure approval and ready the organization. Obtain executive stakeholder approval and prepare to execute and measure performance. Trust me, customizing these seven steps into your seven or your eight, nine, or ten will set you and your leaders up for success. When the work is sequenced, the resource requirements are scheduled and visible, the interdependencies are understood, and the right people have helped shape the details, your leaders and teams will no longer have to wait for constant direction. They will know what to do, when and under what constraints. The doors to empowerment and accountability will be kicked wide open. And speaking of accountability, that's exactly where we're going next on the LeadershipSOPs podcast. Until then, find, follow, and message me on LinkedIn or within the LeadershipSOPs app, and as always, lead on.

Speaker 1 23:33

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