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Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning

THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are (1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. This is what I call horizontal focus. Although it may seem simple, the actual application of the process can create profound results.

You've got to think about the big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

Enhancing "Vertical" Focus

Horizontal focus is all you'll need in most situations, most of the time. Sometimes, however, you may need greater rigor and focus to get a project under control, to identify a solution, or to ensure that all the right steps have been determined. This is where vertical focus comes in. Knowing how to think productively in this more "vertical" way and how to integrate the results into your personal system is the second powerful behavior set needed for knowledge work.

The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas.

The good news is, there is a productive way to think about projects, situations, and topics that creates maximum value with minimal expenditure of time and effort. It happens to be the way we naturally think and plan, though not necessarily the way we normally plan when we consciously try to get a project under control. In my experience, when people do more planning, more informally and naturally, they relieve a great deal of stress and obtain better results.

The Natural Planning Model

You're already familiar with the most brilliant and creative planner in the world: your brain. You yourself are actually a planning machine. You're planning when you get dressed, eat lunch, go to the store, or simply talk. Although the process may seem somewhat random, a quite complex series of steps in fact has to occur before your brain can make anything happen physically. Your mind goes through five steps to accomplish virtually any task:1. Defining purpose and principles 2. Outcome visioning

3. Brainstorming

4. Organizing

5. Identifying next actions

The most experienced planner in the world is your brain.

A Simple Example: Planning Dinner Out Once you had generated a sufficient number of ideas and details, you couldn't help but start to organize them. You may have thought or said, "First we need to find out if the restaurant is open", or "Let's call the Andersons and see if they'd like to go out with us." Once you've generated various thoughts relevant to the outcome, your mind will automatically begin to sort them by components (subprojects), priorities, and/or sequences of events. Components would be: "We need to handle logistics, people, and location." Priorities would be: "It's critical to find out if the client really would like to go to dinner." Sequences would be: "First we need to check whether the restaurant is open, then call the Andersons, then get dressed."Natural Planning Is Not Necessarily Normal If you're like most people I interact with in a coaching or consulting capacity, the collective answer to these questions is, probably not. There are likely to be at least some components of the natural planning model that you haven't implemented.

In some of my seminars I get participants to actually plan a current strategic project that uses this model. In only a few minutes they walk themselves through all five phases, and usually end up being amazed at how much progress they've made compared with what they have tried to do in the past. One gentleman came up afterward and told me, "I don't know whether I should thank you or be angry. I just finished a business plan I've been telling myself would take months, and now I have no excuses for not doing it!"The Unnatural Planning Model

When the "Good Idea" Is a Bad Idea If you're waiting to have a good idea before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas.

Trying to approach any situation from a perspective that is not the natural way your mind operates will be difficult. People do it all the time, but it almost always engenders a lack of clarity and increased stress. In interactions with others, it opens the door for egos, politics, and hidden agendas to take over the discussion (generally speaking, the most verbally aggressive will run the show). And if it's just you, attempting to come up with a "good idea" before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of initial bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation.

Let's Blame Mrs. Williams

If you're like most people in our culture, the only formal training you've ever had in planning and organizing proactively was in the fourth or fifth grade. And even if that wasn't the only education you've had in this area, it was probably the most emotionally intense (meaning it sank in the deepest).

Outlines were easy, as long as you wrote the report first.

In the end, I did learn to write outlines. I just wrote the report first, then made up an outline from the report, after the fact.

That's what most people learned about planning from our educational system. And I still see outlines done after the fact, just to please the authorities. In the business world, they're often headed "Goals" and "Objectives." But they still have very little to do with what people are doing or what they're inspired about. These documents are sitting in drawers and in e-mails somewhere, bearing little relationship to operational reality.

The Reactive Planning Model

The unnatural planning model is what most people consciously think of as "planning," and because it's so often artificial and irrelevant to real work, people just don't plan. At least not on the front end: they resist planning meetings, presentations, and strategic operations until the last minute.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Don't just do something. Stand there.

Natural Planning Techniques: The Five Phases Let's examine each of the five phases of natural planning and see how we can leverage these contexts.

Purpose

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

I admit it: this is nothing but advanced common sense. To know and to be clear about the purpose of any activity are prime directives for clarity, creative development, and cooperation. But it's common sense that's not commonly practiced, simply because it's so easy for us to create things, get caught up in the form of what we've created, and let our connection with our real and primary intentions slip.

The Value of Thinking About "Why"Let's take a closer look at each of these in turn.

People love to win. If you're not totally clear about the purpose of what you're doing, you have no chance of winning.

It Defines Success People are starved for "wins" these days. We love to play games, and we like to win, or at least be in a position where we could win. And if you're not totally clear about the purpose of what you're doing, you have no chance of winning. Purpose defines success. It's the primal reference point for any investment of time and energy, from deciding to run for elective office to designing a form.

Celebrate any progress. Don't wait to get perfect.

Often the only way to make a hard decision is to come back to the purpose.

If you're not sure why you're doing something, you can never do enough of it.

Principles

Of equal value as prime criteria for driving and directing a project are the standards and values you hold. Although people seldom think about these consciously, they are always there. And if they are violated, the result will inevitably be unproductive distraction and stress.

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

Whereas purpose provides the juice and the direction, principles define the parameters of action and the criteria for excellence of behavior.

Vision/Outcome

For example, graduates of your seminar are demonstrating consistently applied knowledge of the subject matter. Market share has increased 2 percent within the northeastern region over the last fiscal year. Your daughter is clear about your guidelines and support for her first semester in college.

The Power of Focus

Since the 1960s thousands of books have expounded on the value of appropriate positive imagery and focus. Forward-looking focus has even been a key element in Olympic-level sports training, with athletes imagining the physical effort, the positive energy, and the successful result to ensure the highest level of unconscious support for their performance.

We know that the focus we hold in our minds affects what we perceive and how we perform. This is as true on the golf course as it is in a staff meeting or during a serious conversation with a spouse. My interest lies in providing a model for focus that is dynamic in a practical way, especially in project thinking.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

The Reticular Activating System The May 1957 issue of Scientific American contained an article describing the discovery of the reticular formation at the base of the brain. The reticular formation is basically the gateway to your conscious awareness; it's the switch that turns on your perception of ideas and data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music's playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room.

Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.

Clarifying Outcomes

There is a simple but profound principle that emerges from understanding the way your perceptive filters work: you won't see how to do it until you see yourself doing it.

You often need to make it up in your mind before you can make it happen in your life.

Many of us hold ourselves back from imaging a desired outcome unless someone can show us how to get there. Unfortunately, that's backward in terms of how our minds work to generate and recognize solutions and methods.

One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most important to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes. This is not as self-evident as it may sound. We need to constantly define (and redefine) what we're trying to accomplish on many different levels, and consistently reallocate resources toward getting these tasks completed as effectively and efficiently as possible.

I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.

Outcome/vision can range from a simple statement of the project, such as "Finalize computer-system implementation," to a completely scripted movie depicting the future scene in all its glorious detail. Here are three basic steps for developing a vision:1. View the project from beyond the completion date.

3. Capture features, aspects, qualities you imagine in place.

The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.

Brainstorming

Your mind wants to fill in the blanks between here and there, but in somewhat random order.

Capturing Your Ideas

The most popular of these techniques is called mind-mapping, a name coined by Tony Buzan, a British researcher in brain functioning, to label this process of brainstorming ideas onto a graphic format. In mind-mapping, the core idea is presented in the center, with associated ideas growing out in a somewhat free-form fashion around it. For instance, if I found out that I had to move my office, I might think about computers, changing my business cards, all the connections I'd have to change, new furniture, moving the phones, purging and packing, and so on. If I captured these thoughts graphically it might start to look something like this:

You could do this kind of mind-mapping on Post-its that could be stuck on a whiteboard, or you could input ideas into a word processor or outlining program on the computer.

Distributed Cognition

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.

Psychologists are beginning to label this and similar processes "distributed cognition." It's getting things out of your head and into objective, reviewable formats. But my English teacher in high school didn't have to know about the theory to give me the key: "David," he said, "you're going to college, and you're going to be writing papers. Write all your notes and quotes on separate three-by-five cards. Then, when you get ready to organize your thinking, just spread them all out on the floor, see the structure, and figure out what you're missing." Mr. Edmundson was teaching me a major piece of the natural planning model!

Only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them.

Few people can hold their focus on a topic for more than a couple of minutes, without some objective structure and tool or trigger to help them. Pick a big project you have going right now and just try to think of nothing else for more than sixty seconds. This is pretty hard to do unless you have a pen and paper in hand and use those "cognitive artifacts" as the anchor for your ideas. Then you can stay with it for hours. That's why good thinking can happen while you're working on a computer document about a project, mind-mapping it on a legal pad or on a paper tablecloth in a hip restaurant, or just having a meeting about it with other people in a room that allows you to hold the context (a whiteboard with nice wet markers really helps there, too).

Brainstorming Keys

Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out-of-the-box thinking. The basics principles, however, can be summed up as follows:Don't Judge, Challenge, Evaluate, or Criticize It's easy for the unnatural planning model to rear its ugly head in brainstorming, making people jump to premature evaluations and critiques of ideas. If you care even slightly about what a critic thinks, you'll censure your expressive process as you look for the "right" thing to say. There's a very subtle distinction between keeping brainstorming on target with the topic and stifling the creative process. It's also important that brainstorming be put into the overall context of the planning process, because if you think you're doing it just for its own sake, it can seem trite and inappropriately off course. If you can understand it instead as something you're doing right now, for a certain period, before you move toward a resolution at the end, you'll feel more comfortable giving this part of the process its due.

A good way to find out what something might be is to uncover all the things it's probably not.

Put Analysis and Organization in the Background Analysis and evaluation and organization of your thoughts should be given as free a rein as creative out-of-the-box thinking. But in the brainstorming phase, this critical activity should not be the driver.

Making a list can be a creative thing to do, a way to consider the people who should be on your team, the customer requirements for the software, or the components of the business plan. Just make sure to grab all that and keep going until you get into the weeding and organizing of focus that make up the next stage.

Organizing

If you've done a thorough job of emptying your head of all the things that came up in the brainstorming phase, you'll notice that a natural organization is emerging. As my high school English teacher suggested, once you get all the ideas out of your head and in front of your eyes, you'll automatically notice natural relationships and structure. This is what most people are referring to when they talk about "project plans."This is the stage in which you can make good use of structuring tools ranging from informal bullet points, scribbled literally on the back of an envelope, to project-planning software like Microsoft Project. When a project calls for substantial objective control, you'll need some type of hierarchical outline with components and subcomponents, and/or a GANTT-type chart showing stages of the project laid out over time, with independent and dependent parts and milestones identified in relationship to the whole.

A "project plan" identifies the smaller outcomes, which can then be naturally planned.

Creative thinking doesn't stop here; it just takes another form. Once you perceive a basic structure, your mind will start trying to "fill in the blanks." Identifying three key things that you need to handle on the project, for example, may cause you to think of a fourth and a fifth when you see them all lined up.

The Basics of Organizing

The key steps here are:

Next Actions

At some point, if the project is an actionable one, this next-action decision must be made. * Answering the question about what specifically you would do about something physically if you had nothing else to do will test the maturity of your thinking about the project. If you're not yet ready to answer that question, you have more to flesh out at some prior level in the natural planning sequence.

The Basics

In some cases there will be only one aspect that can be activated, and everything else will depend on the results of that. So there may be only one next action, which will be the linchpin for all the rest.

The habit of clarifying the next action on projects, no matter what the situation, is fundamental to you staying in relaxed control.

This next-action conversation forces organizational clarity. Issues and details emerge that don't show up until someone holds everyone's "feet to the fire" about the physical-level reality of resource allocation. It's a simple, practical discussion to foster, and one that can significantly stir the pot and identify weak links.

In general, the reason things are on your mind is that the outcome and the action step(s) have not been appropriately defined, and/or reminders of them have not been put in places where you can be trusted to look for them appropriately. Additionally, you may not have developed the details, perspectives, and solutions sufficiently to trust the efficacy of your blueprint.

If the project is still on your mind, there's more planning to do.

If greater clarity is what you need, shift your thinking up the natural planning scale. People are often very busy (action) but nonetheless experience confusion and a lack of clear direction. They need to pull out their plan, or create one (organize). If there's a lack of clarity at the planning level, there's probably a need for more brainstorming to generate a sufficient inventory of ideas to create trust in the plan. If the brainstorming session gets bogged down with fuzzy thinking, the focus should shift back to the vision of the outcome, ensuring that the reticular filter in the brain will open up to deliver the best how-to thinking. If the outcome/ vision is unclear, you must return to a clean analysis of why you're engaged in the situation in the first place (purpose).

Plans get you into things but you've got to work your way out.

If you've formulated an answer to that question, but things are still stuck, it's probably time for you to grapple with some of the "how" issues and the operational details and perspectives (brainstorming). I often have clients who have inherited a relatively clearly articulated project, like "Implement the new performance-review system," but who aren't moving forward because they haven't yet taken a few minutes to dump some ideas out about what that might entail.

If brainstorming gets hung up (and very often it does for more "blue sky" types), rigor may be required to do some evaluation of and decision-making about mission-critical deliverables that have to be handled (organizing). This is sometimes the case when an informal back-and-forth meeting that has generated lots of ideas ends without producing any decision about what actually needs to happen next on the project.

In the last two chapters, I have covered the basic models of how to stay maximally productive and in control, with minimal effort, at the two most basic levels of our life and work: the actions we take and the projects we enter into that generate many of those actions.

For all those situations that you have any level of commitment to complete, there is a natural planning process that goes on to get you from here to there. Leveraging that five-phase model can often make the evolution easier, faster, and more productive.

You'll find that in part 2.