The Art of the ‘Reverse Plan’
I just did a Google search of what being a successful leader means.
The results that came back described all the essential leadership qualities I’ve already talked about in previous articles, so if you’re a regular reader none of them will come as a surprise.
“A leader sets and achieves challenging goals.”
“A leader takes fast and decisive action.”
“A leader develops their team’s skills so they can reach their full potential.”
“A leader communicates their vision and inspires their people to do the work needed to achieve this better future.”
But, surprisingly, what none of the results has come back with so far is this:
Successful leaders know that a plan without a goal is just a dream.
Which, in my opinion, is one of the most essential leadership qualities of all.
Here's a quick bit of trivia that might seem apropos of nothing, but stick with it for a paragraph, and you'll see why I'm taking us there.
The word ‘Leadership’ was born from a couple of olde worlde words: ‘laedan’, which was the Old-English word for taking and carrying, and ‘leiten', which is a Middle High German word meaning "to lead, guide, travel, or cause to go." A few centuries later, somebody stuck 'ship' on the end to make it clear that a leader is someone at the top of the hierarchy. However, in terms of 'leading, guiding, and causing to go', I think 'ship' works better as a metaphor for how a successful leader sets the course and steers their business so it safely reaches its destination.
In other words, successful leadership starts with having both a plan and a goal because if your plan doesn’t have a goal, it's just a dream. All you'll be leading is a rudderless ship that eventually runs out of steam (i.e., collateral) and sinks without trace.
The good news is if you've got a complete vision and you put your business plan together correctly, your goal (including the smaller goals you'll need to reach to achieve it) will already be there. Without that complete vision and properly conceived business plan, you'll be a bit like the Hindenburg inventor who didn't stop to consider that filling his airship with flammable gas might not be the most brilliant idea. Let’s face it, nothing says, “Failing to plan means planning to fail” better than realising if you’d just stopped for a moment and asked one of your trusted experts, “Is there something safer we could fill our airships up with instead of hydrogen?” your trans-Atlantic Zeppelin business might have been a massive success, instead of exploding into a ball of flames above a New Jersey airfield.
(Although, to be honest, The Zeppelin Airline Company's plan to take passengers luxuriously from Germany to America in 60 hours did have a goal, and they did almost reach it. However, missing out on the part of the goal that covered 'How to land safely with all our passengers still alive' turned out to be more than a bit of a business-destroying oversight.)
That's why a successful leader always backs their vision up with a comprehensive business plan, and a comprehensive business plan will naturally have all the critical goals built in.
The benefits of a comprehensive, goal-oriented business plan
It takes the vision out of the leader's head and onto the paper so that it can be revised, refined and moulded into a workable plan.
Making the vision a workable plan means determining its objectives and defining what the ultimate goal will be. Once the leader knows the objectives and ultimate goal, their vision is no longer just a dream; it's a plan with a realistic destination.
With the objectives and goal identified, the leader can anticipate any potential roadblocks and challenges. Sometimes, working out the roadblocks and finding ways around them can lead to solutions that make the ultimate goal even bigger and better.
Now that the leader knows the goal, objectives, and potential challenges, they can break the plan down into smaller goals, set deadlines, and allocate resources accordingly.
Just as importantly, the leader will be able to communicate their vision more inspiringly to their management team and employees. Everyone will see the vision more clearly, they'll understand the vision's goal, and they'll recognise the valuable part each of them plays in achieving it.
How reverse planning can help
Reverse planning, sometimes called ‘mirror planning', is precisely what it sounds like.
Instead of taking your vision and working forward to identify your goal, you start by taking the endpoint of your vision and then work it backwards. According to research conducted by the Universities of Iowa, Peking, and Korea, how people plan influences how successfully (or not) they reach their goals. The study shows that reverse planning helps because it forces us to think of our future end goal as if it's already happened and then visualise the steps we took to attain it. The researchers call this technique "future introspection." Although the study was focused on university students who were planning on tackling goals like revising for an exam or preparing for a job interview, it’s a technique that can be useful for anyone who wants to ensure their plan has an achievable goal and isn’t just a dream.
Creating a reverse plan
Start at the end.
Every good leader has a vision, and that vision is the leader's dream for their company. But a leadership vision isn't only a dream of what the leader wants their company to be and where they want it to go; it's also – in the words of the entrepreneur and author Tony Robbins – "What makes a company worth working for."
So, whatever the vision results in inside the leader’s mind, that’s the goal to start working backwards from.
Imagine you’ve already reached your goal. What was the last step you took before reaching it? What was the second-to-last step? The third-to-last step?
Outline all the steps.
Reverse planning research has shown that working backwards from the goal and envisioning all the steps you took to get there gives you greater clarity of vision and increases confidence, reduces anxiety, and leads to more productive action.
What you must do for it to work is be as specific and realistic about each step as possible and turn all the significant steps into milestones that you then attach levels of importance and timescales to.
Trust the process.
To begin with, reverse planning won’t seem much different than ordinary planning because, like straightforward chronological planning, it will feel as if all you’re doing is breaking your plan down into a series of actionable steps. But trust the process.
The beauty of reverse planning is that it assumes you’ve already reached your goal, and then it makes you work out all the finer details of how you got to your goal right back to the beginning. If you're doing it correctly, you can't skip a series of steps by telling yourself you'll work that part out later, which is always the temptation when you're planning forwards chronologically. Also, because you're reverse planning away from your goal, it's much harder to build in steps that patently won’t work when your team eventually tries to put them into practice.
For example, when you plan chronologically, you might reach step eight, realise you've hit a block, and then make step eight something that's a bit flawed or vacuous just so you can keep moving forward with your vision and reach step nine. But, when you reverse plan, you'll be at step nine with all the confidence you've already gained your goal and, according to the research, that makes it much more likely you'll look for a valid solution to the problem of step eight.
In other words, reverse planning tricks your mind into being more solutions-focused than forward planning does. That's because the danger of forward planning is you might sketch the steps in without planning them properly, just to prove that your vision works (which means there's a good chance that it doesn't, so your goal won't work either.)
Make the ultimate goal the priority.
One of the other reasons reverse planning is so effective is because it encourages you to identify your goal at the very beginning and then stay focused on it all the way back to the start of the process. When you forward plan, it’s much easier to get distracted by everything that might go wrong along the way and end up with a diluted vision. When you reverse plan from the basis you’ve already achieved your vision, it puts you in the correct mind-frame to succeed. It will put everyone you're leading in the proper mind-frame to succeed too.
And that's how to be confident your leadership plan has a goal and isn't just a dream.