The Big Reset: Make your Manifesto
A LookUP guide to starting Annual Planning properly
How do you make the kickoff to your Annual Planning the start of something big…not the starting gun for an avalanche of disparate, misaligned tactics?
It’s all too easy to take the inertia of the day-to-day into the process with us. The end result…a plan that means doing everything again, and more, with less.
Well, if you want next year to be different from this year, for your organisation, your team, your client, or yourself), this piece is for you.
It’s a hands-on guide to making Annual Planning a Big Reset.
But before we start, we’d like you to grab a piece of paper.
Picture in your mind where you’d like to get to next year.
Quickly sketch out what next year looks like.
We wish we could see what you’ve drawn. Is it a list? A spreadsheet? A picture of something? (Photos very welcome!)
Once you’ve read this piece, worked through the exercises, and joined our LookUP Live session later in the month) you’ll have something much clearer that gets your Annual Planning off on the right foot - and maximises the chance of a Big Reset.
You’ll be holding a Manifesto for the year ahead.
In our last piece here we talked about three problems that we all encounter in thinking future-back. If you haven’t read that yet, start there! There’s a reminder of the key problems below.
Now, we’re going to show you three steps that will help you create your Manifesto, and make your Annual Planning a Big Reset: Vision, Levers and Start Points.
If, at the end, you’d like to go a bit deeper, you’ve got two options.
We’ll be running a LookUP Live session on Zoom on Thursday 25th April, 10-11:30. You can add it to your calendar here…
Add event to calendar
If you think your team could do with getting Annual Planning started differently, please get in touch! We run Big Reset sessions with all kinds of different teams and organisations. Start with matthew@wearelookup.com
First, a small caveat. To make the biggest, most enduring impact, this kind of thinking should be a team sport, not an individual pursuit.
The more your Plan is informed by multiple disciplines and perspectives, the stronger and more robust it will be. As Matthew Syed explores in Rebel Ideas, there’s no Plan that doesn’t become better from greater cognitive diversity. And getting more people involved will also massively increase your chances of having one Big Reset, rather than a hundred tactical plans.
That’s why when we run these processes with clients, we focus on bringing people together in a shared process of Manifesto-building. It’s a clarifying, motivating experience that kicks off Annual Planning in the right way.
But for today, we want to give you a sample of that experience by helping you to walk through the framework on your own. We are going to focus on helping you to build one of these…a Big Reset Manifesto.
Choose your challenge.
Whether you’re a founder, a business leader, an advisor, or an independent, this framework is for you. The key is to be clear what Annual Plan you need to make, and why.
Then start thinking: what kind of year do you want this to be? Will it be a year of revolutionary change? A year of resilient hanging-on? Somewhere in the middle?
It’s good to have a sense of your appetite for risk, your space for movement, and where you’d like to end up.
The reality is that the picture of what you want from the next year is probably still quite blurry. So let’s start by addressing that.
Step 1: Vision
The present feels real, and the future doesn’t. How can it compete?
We need to make the future come to life.
Resist the temptation to reach for a number - a market share, a profit margin, a fundraising goal. That’s all incredibly important stuff, but really you are looking for something vivid and visceral - an image, an object, or a statement. Something that encapsulates your future vision for you and others.
If reducing your complex future to a single item feels impossible, I’d like to introduce you to Kate Raworth. Her life mission is to uproot the entire orthodoxy of economic theory, and build a new vision for the world’s economy. One that preserves life’s key needs and pleasures, whilst ensuring we avoid ecological collapse.
This is her Vision of the future.
She is the inventor and advocate for ‘Doughnut Economics’. A revolutionary and powerful Manifesto, that describes a future state for humanity in between our social foundations and our ecological ceiling.
There’s a lot of complexity to this concept. But the vision of the doughnut is incredibly intuitive. It gives us an immediate sense of the ‘Goldilocks zone’ in between different kinds of disaster. It gives us a sense of what it will feel like. What will change, and what will stay the same. And using something simple, something that we like, is incredibly powerful.
Now, bear in mind she’s encapsulating capturing the entire future of human activity! There’s a lot more in it than just a doughnut. But on the Doughnut, we can hang a more sophisticated understanding of change. Here is the visualisation, created by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics Action Lab…
How do you find your Doughnut?
Exercise 1: Creating your Vision
Here’s a visual template to guide you through this part of the process…
What Change Matters?
In our ‘Big Reset’ introduction, we talked about the difference between deep change and surface change. A Vision that is derived from superficial change won’t stick, and will rarely change anything. To describe the change you are trying to make, you are looking for something that is much more deep-rooted.
That means asking some of the ‘big’ questions:
Are our potential customers changing…or should they?
Can we do a better job in how we sell to or serve them?
Is culture changing against us, or in our favour?
Is someone else going to come and steal our future?
In the case of the Doughnut, Kate Raworth is really just talking about two things: something we don’t want to change too much (society being coherent, and enjoyable), and something that will change unless we do something significant about it (ecological change.)
There aren’t really that many of these questions, and when you are asking if they will change, it’s ok if the answer to a few of them is ‘not really’. In fact, that’s the essence of good strategic thinking.
But if you’ve found one or two that are niggling, go deeper. What’s pretty likely to move? What would the consequence of that be for us? Is there something that’s less likely to move dramatically…but if it does the impact would be considerable?
From this you can answer two critical questions:
What’s the big shift, really?
How would you describe its impact?
Precision on this shift is as important as anything you will think about, as embodied by Simeon, Economist and LookUP expert, here…
What will it feel like?
Even once we’ve identified a core shift, it’s sometimes difficult to really feel what the new state will feel like.
This means that when people use your direction as an instruction manual, they will most likely start aiming at the symptoms, or relapsing to the present.
Ideally, if your cultural antennae are out and working, you will already have a sense of where the Future is in the Now.
Where you’ll tend to find this is by spending time speaking to. By listening to these people, by understanding their stories, we’ll be able to answer a couple of fundamental questions:
What will our Future feel like?
What stories will happen there that don’t happen now?
In summary
Having done the groundwork, it’s time to revisit your Vision. Here’s your checklist:
What’s the really big shift?
Can you think of a smart shorthand or visual to express it?
What’s going to change? What will stay the same?
What will happen? What will it feel like?
Step 2: Levers
If the future Vision you’ve created is real, and exciting, it will immediately start fizzing with energy, and with that will come a thousand things you want to do.
But, if you are going to make your vision a reality, prioritisation is going to be essential.
The cornerstone of prioritisation is asking some horrible, awkward questions, and being prepared to hear some unpalatable answers. After all, if this Big Reset was easy, you probably would have done it already.
It’s time to ask…
What will it take for this to succeed?
Why might this fail?
What will we need if the unexpected happens?
From these questions you should be able to build a set of Levers - broad areas of concentrated action which come together to make your Vision much more likely to come to life.
Exercise 2: Building Your Levers
To help you walk through this, here’s a useful template to guide you…
Let’s start with some speed writing.
Put your Vision in front of you, and then on a blank sheet of paper, scribble all the important ways you can think of to answer this question in the next five minutes
“We will succeed because…”
During these five minutes, really push yourself to think about the big, hairy things. The ones that if you were able to crack them, would make success much more likely.
Then, take a minute to *star the things that matter most.
OK, let’s go again. But with more negative energy.
“This is going to fail because…”
This is a space where you need to be brutally honest. Where are you unprepared to do this? Where is the competition going to come and steal your future from you? What skills, resources, capabilities do you lack?
Again, *star the things that matter most.
As you review your lists you should find that threads start to form between them. Many of the positives and the negatives are two sides of the same coin. Many of the small things you think of are clearly part of something bigger that needs to get done.
Group them. Connect them. Bundle them up into something bigger.
What have you found?
We went through this process at the start of the year for LookUP, and that’s how you, and we ended up here.
We wanted to build a bigger, more diverse, more inspiring business that helped both organisations and individuals to get ahead of change.
But once we’d thoroughly explored what it would take to make it happen, it came down to 4 things…
A growing community who we can interact directly with
Expert-inspired frameworks that we land at key moments of change
Deeper client relationships that scale and grow over time
Decent operational systems that keep us sane and productive
Everything we say, do, invent, and action that drives one of these levers pushes us closer to our goal.
Your Levers should also put you in a great place to anticipate and prepare for the unexpected. This is a good time to test that!
Envisage three genuinely probable scenarios that might force you to change your Plan significantly.
How would your levers flex to help you meet the situation?
When we run ‘The Big Reset’ sessions with organisations, we find people can be instinctively resistant to this kind of scenario-based planning. It’s as if they feel like they are accepting potential failure.
The truth is, uncertainty is a hallmark of modern life, and you can only pivot well by rebalancing your Levers, or refining the way you execute them, without losing track of the overall goals.
And as Liane Robinson, CEO, AI pioneer and LookUP Expert expresses here, pivoting and learning is one of the most positive things you can do.
Step 3: Start Points
As we discussed in the barriers piece, Big Resets fail, not because people don’t want the change, but precisely because they do but don’t know where to start.
Your Manifesto isn’t complete without key Start Points, which help you (and the people around you who are crucial to the Plan) to get started.
Exercise 3: Finding your Start Points
Here’s a simple template to guide you through…
Q1: What do we need to learn?
Any good Plan includes some leaps into the unknown. There’s a natural fear that comes with this. The only antidote to fear is knowledge, and experience.
The Planning process should be the starting point for a process of filling gaps. Capture what else you need to know right now.
Does that require research? Outreach? Better antennae?
Q2: What do we need to test?
How Big Things Get Done shows that successful mega-projects are defined by teams beginning to build early, and repetitively.
The first version we make of something probably won’t work. The second version won’t be optimal. We have to do it again, and again, and again.
If something is crucial to the plan next year, we need to start testing it now. Planning and doing shouldn’t be opposites. They are part of the same process.
Write down two or three things you need to test before the year begins, so you can do them in the year. These shouldn’t be random experiments, but smaller versions of the bigger actions that we are about to commit to…so that we can better understand the impact, and fix the bigs.
Q3: What can we afford to drop?
The question that has led to more tumbleweed moments than any others in our strategic careers is ‘what can we stop doing?’. People are busy to the point of overload, but when someone suggests that the work is unnecessary, they begin to panic.
But identifying what we need to stop is just as important as what we start. It’s all part of the Reset! If there are things we are doing that aren’t driving the key levers we’ve identified, we just shouldn’t do them.
“This is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
Greg McKeown, Essentialism
Q4: Who do we need to get involved?
A plan is nothing without people. That’s about making sure that everyone who needs to be involved understands the plan, and knows their role in it. After a period where business culture fell in love with disruption (with some nasty consequences) there’s much more focus now on how we Move Fast and Fix Things, and as author Frances Frei notes: “if we have not first earned trust and we go fast, we will break things guaranteed. But if we do earn trust first, we can go fast, and we will not break things."
But it’s also about the plan being nurtured, having sponsors, having mentors. A really useful way of thinking about this is the ‘Personal Board of Directors’ – a group of people who co-sponsor the plan, and the person creating it.
Time to put it all together!
By now, you should be able to put together the first version of your FutureMaker manifesto.
How’s it looking for you?
If you’d like to go a bit deeper, you’ve got two options.
We’ll be running a LookUP Live session on Zoom on Thursday 25th April, 10-11:30. You can add it to your calendar here…
Add event to calendar
If you think your team could do with getting Annual Planning started differently, please get in touch! We run Big Reset sessions with all kinds of different teams and organisations. Start with matthew@wearelookup.com
Go further:
For our paid subscribers here’s a lot more coming this month - full interviews with Lianre, Kian, Simeon and Mel; a LookUP List packed with recommendations for further reading, watching and immersing; and a few bonus items along the way!
If you want to have more one-on-one guidance on your The Big Reset, or are interested in booking sessions for people in your organisation, get in touch at matthew@wearelookup.com.
Next month:
Next month’s theme is ‘Trouble in Paradise’.
We’ve been through a period where ways of working have changed abruptly, and cultures have come under pressure. Collaboration is constant and yet seemingly more awkward and frictional than ever. Getting people aligned is essential.
We’ll be exploring some of the best ways to rebuild vibrant working cultures, by becoming better CommunityBuilders. More to come!