Sherpa Alliance

Frequently Asked Question:  "Why do we need a Traction Plan and an Annual Plan of Goals?"  and, in some cases, "Why do we need a Traction Plan when we already have an Annual Plan of Corprate Goals?"

The first answer is easy - "because an Annual Plan of Corporate Goals is just that, Annual, whereas a Traction Plan addresses the multi-year journey/trajectory to your vision (typically over a 3, 5 or 10 year time-horizon) and, for instance, 5 one-year plans do not a 5-year plan make!"

• We can easily end up in a situation of over engineered goals - the organization is so engineered to its annual goals (invested in cascade/flow-down of SMART goals and maybe approval process with the Corporate Board) that, when the goal-posts get moved, we get caught flat-footed.  If the world has veered 45 degrees left, the effort involved in re-engineeringing the corporation’s goals 45 degrees left can be too great and we are left pursuing and being measured against goals which are straight on.  Not good.
• We can easily be left with semi, short-termism, of year to year, if not quarter to quarter.  as systems thinkers say, "if you seek to maximize the parts, you can often sub-optimize the whole".  If you seek to maximize the parts (years/quarters) you can sub-optimize the whole (multi-year journey)

The second answer is a little more tricky - "because an Annual Plan of Corporate Goals addresses convergence (goals looking for actions, leading actions) but not divergence (actions looking for goals, leading goals)".  Here’s where it get’s interesting, as the typical left-brained dominance of most executive teams (Being Half-Brained (Left or Right)) kicks into overdrive and, almost in unison, says something like "huh?".  That’s because strategic pre-adaptation is a foriegn, predominantly right-brained, concept.  Let the games begin!

• The left-brain percieves that actions only have value if they convergently flow out of achieving goals and that actions orphoned from goals just don’t make business-sense!  The left-brain is good at assessing the probability that a goal will be achieved by the amalgamation of actions leading towards it.
• The right-brain perceives that actions have value as divergent free-agents, unattached to particular short-term goals, flowing into the possibility of achieving larger goals, further into the future.  The right-brain is good at assessing the possibility that an action might amalgamte into the acihievement of a bigger, future goal, which makes perfect business-sense!

The third answer usually get’s their attention - "because you don’t want an Eastern Airlines in your future (see the Eastern Airlines story in Divergence & Convergence) and, therefore, you must master the divergent, dynamic complexity (flying the plane) and convergent, detail complexity (fixing bulbs) of your journey as a business - that is, if you want the business to achieve its desired flight plan/trajectory of profit and growth (with you getting your piece of that action), without the risk of going into an imperceptible descent … which may already be the case!."  Their protestations of, "oh, I don’t think so, we are focused on doing a lot of things and working hard" only serve tp enrich the Eastern Airlines story as more relevant and scary than ever!

• The whole point of an imperceptible descent is that it is "imperceptible" and our normal metrics/measures are not necessarily the real leading-indicators of "altitude" for our business.  How many businesses have we seen lately who have seemingly been flying high, by normal metrics, only to end up in a nose-dive and then irrecoverable tail-spin soon there after!  It’s not as simple as deducing altitude from net-profit, gross-margin and revenue, or even order-book, order-intake and  prospects funnel.  We have to look harder for other key altimeters of our business, to see the leading-indicator/early-warning-signs of an imperceptible descent.
• We are so prone to denial  and group-think that everything is fine, with that lone voice of skepticism being very lonely.  Even when a member of the team looks up and spots an altimeter reading 150 feet (see the Eastern Airlines story in Divergence & Convergence), there can still be a debate of whether we are at 150 feet or 2000 feet.  These are the mental traps we are so prone to falling into.

The Traction Plan provides a divergence counter-balance to the convergence of an annual plan of goals. Leveraging the power of a visual tool to master detail complexity and dynamic complexity, the Traction Plan helps us crystallize the elegant simplicity of an executable plan, which is monitored and evolved on an ongoing and dynamic basis, mobilizing our team.  It is about putting a lot of divergent actions in motion, on a triaged basis, from which convergent breakthrough goals become possible.  Done optimally, we first complete a divergent Traction Plan, serving our multi-year journey as captured in a number of other tools, from which falls out our annual plan of goals for the succession of annual periods.  If we are serious about organizational agility and mitigating the risk of having an Eastern Airlines scenario in our future, we need both the divergence of a Traction Plan and the convergence of an Annual Plan of Goals, interwoven with actions leading goals and goals leading actions.  This is where our organizational agility comes from.