A robust planning system is the engine that drives progress, whether in business, personal goals, or life itself. In the previous post, we outlined four essential layers that form the backbone of any effective plan: the road map, the resource plan, the budget, and the action plan. Today, we’ll dive deeper, not just into understanding these elements, but into the critical role action plays in making a planning system come alive.
We often think of planning as something we do on paper or in our minds. But in reality, a successful planning system is a dynamic, living entity. It evolves as you act, learn, and grow. And at the heart of this system are two fundamental elements: information and action. Information is the air your system breathes, allowing you to make informed decisions and set clear objectives. But action is the heart – it pumps life into your plans, creating a rhythm that keeps everything in motion.
The Four Layers of a Plan
Before we explore how action drives your planning system, let’s revisit the four layers that form its foundation:
- The Road Map: This is your big picture. It outlines the overall journey, the milestones you aim to reach, and the path you’ll take to get there. It’s your North Star, guiding your decisions.
- Resource Planning: Often mistaken for budgeting, resource planning is all about identifying the tools and skills you need to invest in to make your goals achievable. It’s about planning for growth, not just managing costs.
- The Budget: This layer is more straightforward—it allocates the financial resources required to execute your plan. A good budget ensures that you’re equipped to reach each milestone without running out of fuel.
- The Action Plan: The most dynamic part of your system. It breaks down the big goals into actionable steps, outlining the „what,“ „when,“ and „how“ of executing your plan.
Action: The Driving Force of Any Planning System
Action is the most crucial element in any planning system. Without action, your plan is powerless. Instead of bringing fruits it collects dust in the world of dreams. What makes action so powerful is that it creates feedback. This feedback is more than just verbal responses from others – it’s the tangible results and reactions that happen in response to your actions.
For example, let’s say you’re building something as simple as a door or window in a wall. If you don’t know exactly how that wall was constructed—whether it’s made of concrete, bricks, or timber and mud – you wouldn’t just start cutting. You’d probe the wall first, gathering feedback from the material to understand how it will react to your actions. This is the same with business or personal projects: you take action, measure the results, and adjust based on what you learn. This steady stream of improvement, driven by a feedback loop of action and response, is the foundation of the aphorism „nothing is impossible“.
Feedback: Beyond Words
Feedback doesn’t always come in the form of spoken or written words from other people. Results are a form of feedback as well. Sometimes, those results are changes in how things operate after you take action. In business, when you launch a new product or service, the market’s response – whether it’s through sales numbers, customer reviews, or changes in web traffic – speaks volumes.
But feedback also includes more subtle responses: the actions other people take as a result of your actions. If you’re leading a team, for instance, the changes in how your team operates after you introduce a new process or tool provide important feedback about your leadership and decision-making. All of these insights, spoken or unspoken, give you critical data that helps you refine your approach.
Measuring the Results: The Role of KPIs in a Planning System
Now, here’s where many people fall short: they don’t measure the results of their actions. They trust their memory or gut feelings to tell them what’s working and what’s not. But our memories are often selective – they suppress facts that don’t fit into our existing belief systems, which can skew our perception of reality.
This is where measurement comes in. In a business context, we often condense our observations into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs give us a clear, measurable way to track progress and understand how well our plans are working. They provide metrics for the overall performance of the business and serve as hints about where to dig deeper.
For example, let’s say one of your KPIs is customer retention. If this metric suddenly drops, it’s a signal to investigate deeper and figure out what causes the decline. Additionally, KPIs allow us to benchmark our performance against industry leaders, ensuring that we remain competitive and relevant.
But measuring KPIs isn’t limited to business. In our personal lives, we can create KPIs to track our well-being and productivity. For instance, you might track daily sleep time, weight, daily income and expenses, or even time spent with loved ones. Many health apps offer insights into steps walked, walking stability, and speed—data that can help you make informed decisions about your health and lifestyle.
Whether in business or personal life, KPIs provide an objective look at the outcomes of your actions, helping you fine-tune your strategy and adapt as needed.
Action Induces Feedback – Experience is Born
When you act, you generate feedback, and over time, this feedback accumulates into what we call experience. Experience is unique because it’s raw, personal, and specific to your life and business. It provides a deep comparative advantage. No one else has lived your experiences, and no amount of general knowledge can fully replicate the insights you gain from taking action yourself.
Experience teaches you the nuances of your industry, market, or personal life. It shapes your instincts and allows you to make better informed decisions in the future. But here’s the thing—experience is limited by the scope of your actions. It’s a product of what you’ve done so far. Therefore you need to continuously push the boundaries of your actions, if you want to grow.
Balancing Experience with External Knowledge
While experience is invaluable, it has its limits. It’s confined to the actions you’ve taken and the environments you’ve operated within. To expand your understanding and continue evolving, you need to seek out generally available, high-quality information from external sources. This information – whether found in research papers, books, articles, or conversations with mentors – gives you a broader context, allowing you to make even better informed decisions.
The difference between experience and external knowledge is that experience creates raw information. It’s the direct result of your actions and interactions. External knowledge, on the other hand, is preprocessed information—it’s already been analyzed and synthesized by others, making it easier for you to access and apply to your own situation.
Acquiring external knowledge also takes action – it requires research, evaluation, and validation. But it plays a different role in your planning system. While experience shapes your personalized insights, external information helps you stay ahead of the curve, adapt to new challenges early on, and avoid mistakes others have made before you.
Final Thoughts: A Living, Breathing Planning System
In summary, a well-functioning planning system is a living entity. It breathes in information and pulses with the rhythm of action. Action drives feedback, and feedback accumulates into experience. Experience, in turn, refines your actions, creating a continuous loop of learning and growth.
But remember: to keep growing, you need both experience and external knowledge. Rely on experience for the deep, personalized insights it offers, but don’t neglect the wealth of information that exists beyond your own actions. Together, these elements will help you operate a planning system that allows you not only to survive but lets you thrive. It opens for you the cycle of excellence.
If you want to invite that cycle of excellence into your own life, here is a great offer for you. I’ve condensed years of research and decades of personal life experience into a coaching program. I call it
The LOVE Plan for Success and Inner Growth
The program guides you through five steps to reinvent your life:
1.) Self observation. Free up the energy and time you need for change by going after the low hanging fruits.
2.) Reconnect to your soul and rediscover your personal purpose and mission in life.
3.) Find people who help you on your journey.
4.) Create a plan that guides you on your journey and measures your progress.
5.) Execute your plan and initiate your cycle of excellence
If you’d like to learn more about The LOVE Plan for Success and Inner Growth, I invite you to a free, one-on-one strategy session. During this session, we’ll find out whether we’re a good fit to take the next steps together.
If we are, that’s great! If not, that’s perfectly fine, too. Either way, we’ll spend an inspiring and interesting hour together.
PS: This is the text version of episode 33 of the Success and Inner Growth Podcast
