A lesson on not giving up, team alignment is hard and a pitch for better planning

I'd like to kick off with a little inspiration. There's enough heaviness out there that a dose of positivity is needed to get you going.

With that, have a listen to this 1993 speech by former basketball coach Jimmy Valvano before he passed way too young. He gets to the heart of what matters every day: "Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think, you should spend some time in thought. And number three is you should have your emotions moved to tears."

Meanwhile, 13 billion years ago . . .

How about these images of deep space by the James Webb Space Telescope? They seem to be popping up everywhere on the inter webs this week because they're that incredible. Talk about putting our planet into perspective. And then you and I within our planet. What a miracle we're here and have the ability to create. These images remind me to make the most of the time I have. Put away the regret for the time I've squandered. And appreciate what is possible.

On gaining alignment and more effective planning

It often seems one of the hardest things to do in business is get people on teams and across teams aligned. Easy to agree on a common goal. Much harder to translate that agreement into alignment. After the fancy offsites and grand prognostications teams make when they come together for annual planning, daily 'fires' often squelch these best of intentions.

We go through the year in our jobs moving from project to project, responding to emails and calls and chats. Attending meetings and producing spreadsheets. Only to find ourselves at the end of the year missing the mark. We focus on the classic 'urgent but not important' quadrant putting off the 'important but not urgent' aspirations.

And then we rinse and repeat. How much money do businesses spend on these annual planning events without seeing a return? What's not always built in is real time review and pivoting based on changing market forces. Or finding that the products and services we planned aren't the right ones and we should build something different. Or our priorities are not actually the customers' priorities because we didn't fully listen. Or that our goals are unrealistic for the time and resources we have to dedicate to them. Businesses aren't that different than we individuals in this way.

Annual goals are damn hard to achieve unless you attach smaller, quarterly goals to them and visit them weekly to know if you're on or off track. Sometimes it takes three months to do 'annual planning' when we should really keep going on the path we set out for last year. Sometime ago I wrote about the 36 month year. It takes time to create substantial value. It takes time to build teams and get them rowing in the same direction.

It's easy to overcomplicate strategic business planning. We want all the charts and metrics and data to justify spend and revenue forecasts. Our spreadsheets become our security blankets we hide behind. We're afraid to go out on a limb without hard data and make plans based on well founded intuition based on empathic understanding of what our customers need. Decisions based on our keen sense of what the world needs most that we're most uniquely qualified to deliver - as a business and as an individual.

Simplicity is wicked hard because it doesn't give us anything to hide behind. If we're wrong, we can't blame a spreadsheet. We can't blame all the data and research we did. Rather, it's just us, standing there vulnerably naked. And that is one scary place to stand in most companies. Some would say it's career limiting.

How refreshing would it be if more business leaders would push for simplicity over complexity? And longer time horizons for hitting those major goals with sprints between?

Is there a business for you in helping businesses reshape how they plan?

Back to alignment.

So how DO you get teams aligned? By having extreme clarity on what you're trying to accomplish in a given period of time. Everyone rally's around the metric. And knows their role in the process. Check in regularly to see if you're on / off track. Then adjust course as needed. Keep it nimble. Keep it real. It also helps if you have people who value pulling together as a team.

Like many simple things, it's not easy!

The fallacy of productivity tools.

The other thing I want to touch briefly on is the notion of productivity tools. There's a bevy of them to choose from. Thing is, most of these tools and all of the chatter about how to implement and make the most of them take you away from the thing you're trying to be more productive at. The antidote to all this? Do the work. Success only comes from doing the work. And if you do the work then you'll learn what works and what doesn't and be able to iterate effectively because you know where you're headed and why. Productivity tools are an industry themselves. To be more productive, do the work. And to help you do the work, avoid distractions by putting your phone in another room. Close your browser and schedule email checking / responding times. Even schedule an internet break where you go nuts for 15 - 20 minutes and then get back to work. Most important, though, have something worth working for.