The Big Reset: An Annual Plan for LookUP

We take our own medicine, and a Substack is born

Apr 29, 2024

What do you do, when you are firmly on track, but maybe for the wrong destination?

That’s the question we asked ourselves at LookUP in January this year.

We were in the last few months of a first year that had been inspiring, a little exhausting, and had opened our minds to some massive opportunities.

It was time for us to take some of our own medicine, to stop, look up, and think about the future that we really wanted to make.

By doing so, we did a Big Reset of our vision, and our plan, and made a new manifesto for our future, using our Manifesto framework.

This post will tell you a little bit about that journey:

how we came to a much more fully realised vision of what we were trying to do
how we fought our instincts to ideate, and chose our key levers of success
how we found the right start points to get ourselves moving

This is the latest in our popular series in which we take our own medicine, and apply our Frameworks to our own work. You can see how we challenged ourselves to Be the Director here.

It flows from concepts covered in our Big Reset piece here, the Manifesto framework here, and some of the inspirational reading from our LookUP List here.

But you don’t have to read all of that! If you are kicking off your own planning process, hopefully this will give you some inspiration. If you are curious about where we are taking LookUP, and our Community, you’ll find some answers to that here too…

Let’s dive into the future!

What’s our Challenge?

As January approached, our trajectory looked roughly like this:

We’d successfully launched a business that people were taking an interest in
It was clearly viable, with some strong L&D/Strategy workshop products
We were primarily known for our focus on StoryTelling, and pitches
We were loving what we were doing - but it was hard work!

We are both experienced practitioners and successful consultants in our own right, so our priorities were/are not really about growth for its own sake.

We are in this because we see a gap that we are passionate about, and we know we have some of the skills, wisdom and networks to do something about it.

So our priority is to be brave, to innovate and try some new things. To make the most of the base we’ve built to create something that we think the world needs. And along the way to support the kind of professional life we want to live.

What’s our Vision?

Lots of LookUP’s success in our first few months was in the training and L&D space, and our clients have told us that our product in that area stacks up brilliantly.

But our objective was never to build a training business! It was to help people to make sense of all the inspiration in the world, and apply it to their lives in a useful way.

And our primary goal isn’t business transformation (though we certainly hope that’s a consequence). We know we are at our best when we help people to discover a sense of personal progress that ripples into their organisations and the world around them.

That small shift reframes our Vision in a couple of important ways.

Firstly - whilst we focus on key areas of capability which feel essential to the world we live in, and where we feel we have deep expertise (future thinking, community building and storytelling), our real focus is getting ahead of change.

Secondly - we’re not a corporate training business. We are just as interested in individual people, working on themselves, as in organisations. In fact, when we are working with organisations, it’s our focus on giving individuals and teams a platform and power that enables us to make a bigger impact.

So that brings us to our statement of intent for our Annual Plan, and beyond…

We help people and businesses to get ahead of change.

It would have been easy to stop there, but we knew it was important to dig deeper - to be much more specific about the big shifts that were happening in the world, and the shifts that we wanted to make, so our vision was much clearer.

Here are the three fundamental shifts that add context to our vision:

Inspiration overload. There’s now more ‘inspirational’ content in the world than anyone could ever hope to read, and the natural impact of generative AI is that it will trend towards infinite. And yet people, and organisations, remain resolutely uninspired. We want to be part of the process of curation that unlocks that problem.

What will that feel like? We’ve got to make sure we never feel like just another training business. We want to find a different, unique space in between L&D, content and strategic thinking, and stay in that sweet spot, where inspiration turns into action.

The post-hybrid world. There’s no doubt now that it’s a hybrid world, and we are all going to work in it for the foreseeable future. That means that LookUP has to be a business that excels at the physical, the future and the on-demand. And it means that we can use that dynamic to create a bit of freedom for ourselves too.

What will that feel like? We want people to be free to access LookUP in the office, at home, on a phone, wherever - and we want the freedom for ourselves to build the business from an office in Sussex, or a beach-house in Bali.

Longer, multi-dimensional careers. We’ve got the trifecta of longer working lives, less linear ways of thinking about success, and an economy that’s going to be challenging for a long time. That means that a lot of quite established, highly-capable people are going to be looking for new paths and new skills. We want to be a part of helping them.

What will that feel like? We want some old dogs to feel they’ve learnt some new tricks. We want them to reach for our frameworks of thinking when they hit big moments of opportunity and change - and be really glad that they did.

This thinking has given us a vision of what we are building that is much more tangible, easier to feel - and in fact holds much more creative and commercial opportunity than where we started.

What are our levers?

We love new ideas. That’s a powerful driver, but also a potential de-railer. We have a LOT of things we’d love to do! How do we focus on what really matters?

Well, let’s start with what HAS to be true for us to succeed.

We have to provide something uniquely valuable, not just add to the noise (which means combining our best expertise, with an ever-growing set of Experts)
We have to deliver outstanding products that people can access in multiple forms (that’s the power of our Frameworks, and focusing on moments of change)
We have to have to keep building strong and sustained relationships with the organisations who value what we are doing

Not of these points are particularly surprising. There’s nothing there that would have triggered a Big Reset - all this stuff is the path we were already on.

The more powerful question for us is the other, less popular side of the coin: why is this going to fail?

This question was a key unlock for us! It revealed two things.

We had quite a narrow base. We need to be better known, by more people, and have more different relationships with them, with more different models, to give ourselves the flexibility to take the business where we want to go.
We have a slight tendency to burnout. We just get too excited, by too many things, and do them in too many different ways. We need to keep going back to the way we do things, to streamline, simplify and organise.

This led us to two new conclusions about the levers of our future success - that we needed to build a broader reaching community that extended the boundaries of our network; and that we needed to work on our operational systems.

We are only just starting the year, so we’ve only really done deep work on one of them, and given what you know about us so far, you can probably guess what we’ve started on first.

Yes, it’s the LookUP Community - and you are sitting in it!

What are our Start Points?

That brings us on to the final element of our Big Reset Framework, which is all about Start Points, ensuring that planning goes deep enough to ensure execution.

What do we need to learn? We need to commit ourselves to the understanding of community building - in particular growing this kind of community, on Substack. We need to learn the platforms, the rhythms, the shortcuts. We are learning a lot, fast!

What do we need to test? We know the classic workshop structure inside-out. We know a lot about effective virtual working. We need to start testing different ways of giving people learning experiences in ways that are efficient and valuable for them. We have to try new structures and formats before totally committing.

Who do we need to get involved? We need to keep expanding our Expert network, in a way that connects into new categories, new locations, and new topics. If you want to be involved, or you know someone you think we should know, get in touch via matthew@wearelookup.com or caroline@wearelookup.com.

What can we afford to drop? We’ve already left behind some of the work we were doing before - but what we need most of all is to practice what we preach, and to be comfortable to leave things behind that aren’t taking us forward, or helping people and organisations to move forwards. Wherever possible, that will be about substituting, not always adding. So if, along this journey, we start things, and then replace them, you’ll know why!

The progress LookUP has made over the last few months has been very heartening.

We’ve had thousands of readers so far here, hundreds of subscribers, and a fair few paid subscribers too.

Our organisational work is getting stronger and stronger, and our relationships are getting deeper.

We’ve got exciting ideas about where we are going next, the themes we are focused on, the products we are going to create - but crucially they all now have a strong filter, and we know what to say no to.

It genuinely wouldn’t have been possible without that Big Reset process, without being clear what future we want to make, and the levers to make it happen.

Hopefully you’ll have a similar experience - and we’d love to hear about it!