How to make our planning process purposeful?
One of the biggest trends in 2022 is to design workplaces together that put people at the centre and craft experiences and organisational cultures that are more empathetic, inclusive, creative, healthier, humane — which makes organisations grow purposefully.
To uncover the techniques that connect individuals, teams and organisations with a sense of purpose we involved best practices from our partner organisations. Let’s find out together the 14 tips on how to connect purpose to our planning!
Taking in everyone’s insights from our global expert network of the Be-novative Partner Hub gave us some insights and a deeper understanding of how this works at the moment in the ecosystem Be-novative is thriving in.
🌐 Our process: This time we did not follow the steps of the Reflective Solution Focused Practice but in a very similar way we shared our best practices so as a result all of us geared up with new ideas, tools, thoughts, and inspiration. Elvira Kalmar, our Partner Hub Program Facilitator in the Spark Creativity online sessions facilitated the session. Participants were from different continents as always, allowing a diversity of perspectives to cross-pollinate from the USA, Singapore, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary and South Africa.
The 1. challenge: How to include purpose in our personal planning process?
First we have shared our own best practices about individual planning and how we make sure our plans are aligned with our inner Purpose.
Here is a collection of our wisdom:
1. FIND A YEAR PLANNING BOOK OR CREATE YOUR OWN- Many of us in the session confessed using some sort of Year Planning books. Some of us go back as long as 10 Years now with Yearcompass- using it every year to reflect about the past year and plan by finding the focuses of all areas of our life for the coming one. It also has turned out that even though we liked the idea of the Yearcompass, some of us already ventured into creating our own version of it to fit our needs more- be it more solution focused, be it more small company-business focused or just simply have a better design.
2. DISCUSS YOUR YEARBOOK WITH YOUR PARTNER- one of the repeating patterns in the group was that we do not simply fill in the book alone, but many of us like to do this with our life or business partners. Fill in a section alone, then discuss it- and often while talking about it, gaining clarity or new understandings.
3. MASTERMINDS WITH FRIENDS. — some of us get together with friends even for a weekend and do the reflection and planning while having heated discussions, kind reminders and challenging questions by their friends.
“Plans are nothing, planning is everything” — Dwight Eisenhower
4. INSTEAD OF GOALS- ARRIVE TO FOCUS AREAS- while sharing our best practices about what works for us as individuals we have understood that planning and setting goals actually mean a wide variety of things for each of us. Some of us are most motivated by setting SMART goals that will lead them living and fulfilling their Purpose, while others like to define the Theme of the year connected to their individual Purpose, or some in-between defining focus areas of the coming year. We also have realized that even though we have a way we like to do it, experimenting with these different planning and goal settings can bring in a different quality.
5. LIVING WITH EMERGENCE- it is also possible not to plan at all, as long as you are clear about your inner Purpose, your core values, you can also live with emergence: use the opportunities life is presenting to you while living a life true to yourself.
The 2. Challenge: How to include purpose in our business-related planning process?
After our personal planning preferences we have turned our focus towards our clients, the organizations we are supporting in our work. Here is a collection of our wisdom about purposeful planning with organizations:
1. REFLECT ON STRATEGIC SURVEYS TO FIND 3–5 INTERVENTION POINTS.- Many companies conduct surveys among their employees about their engagement and motivation. Analyzing these surveys, ond often more of them together can give you a very good understanding of what are the main intervention topics and points in the organization.
2. USE CROWDSOURCING TO FIND WHAT TO ELIMINATE AND AMPLIFY GLOBALLY AND LOCALLY- With globalformula & microformula voting in a conscious companies group based on the votes they create new programs.
3. EVERY EMPLOYEE CAN ANSWER: ‘WHAT DOES FUTURE-READY MEAN FOR YOU AS AN INDIVIDUAL’? For creating cultural transformation of a company in Saudi Arabia that wants to transform to become more future-ready, a consultant’s client is using a health pulse for creating hype on what the employees should work on. With this question: What does future-ready mean for you as an individual?’, they can find the gap and the opportunity to move towards the outcome that connects back to the purpose.
4. CARD GAME TO OPEN UP AND SPEAK MORE FREELY. Chemistry group’s Boss Up! Card game builds on chronic large-scale organizational problems and in a gamified way it encourages teams to talk about likely and unlikely situations to solve meaningful problems.
5. LISTENING, BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER. Talking more freely is the first step. Sometimes the purpose of the consultant is not to deliver on detailed plans but just to make an impact on the mindset of people. It requires us to be spontaneous and reflect on what is needed right now.
6. CHALLENGING QUESTIONS ON WHY WE WANT GROTH. A great way of being connected to our purpose is through asking the challenging ‘Why’ question. It helps to look beyond the surface. Growth just for the sake of growing and earning more profit is the means but not the ultimate purpose of a team or company.
7. TEAMS CAN GEAR UP THE ORGANIZATION TO DELIVER ON THE IDEAS. Agile transformation and card games like the above encourage people to start acting in small increments bottom-up. Change can happen on a team level that will spread to other teams, too.
8. WE MIGHT NEED DIFFERENT LEVEL OF DETAILS OF THE PLAN. Sometimes we don’t need to keep everything under control. It also depends on the company culture, the project we are working on and the personality of people to decide how much level of detail they feel most comfortable and productive with. Sometimes only knowing the first and the long-term direction is enough, other times we need to also see the milestones, objectives and key results or even a detailed gantt chart to feel they have all they need to succeed.
9. BE MINDFUL AND BUILD ON OR STRENGTHS. Let’s enjoy the process, be mindful and aware of our strengths and abilities we have in the here and now.
What we gained in the experience?
We took away 3 main thoughts from this session:
- “ADVENTURE IS JUST POOR PLANNING.” We can be purposeful without keeping control throughout the planning and implementation journey.
- Our responsibility is to challenge with questions to discover the purpose and listen, bringing people together.
- We have similar, matching methods that complement each other well when it comes to driving positive impact for organizations. We have felt the power of co-creation and meaningful conversations, the power of connectedness even if most of us have never met in person.
Finally, we collaborated on collecting additional topics we would like to share our wisdom, collect ideas or deconstruct success stories about: partners.be-novative.com. Feel free to register and participate still!
If you have an important question or topic, or would like to learn together with our community, just reach out to us applying to our Be-novative Partner Hub.
Gathering knowledge and best practices through Collaborative Learning
About the Be-novative Partner Hub:
The Be-novative Partner Hub is an ecosystem of people and resources whose main goal is envisioning, accelerating, and scaling the success rate of both organizational and product development, creating impactful projects and meaningful solutions locally or globally. We share knowledge, inspire people and actively co-create new methods. We contribute to a better, more creative Earth.
The Be-novative Partner Hub members, consultants in people experience, organization design and development, Design Thinking, innovation consultants, and management consultants from around the globe are committed to learning from each other and with each other about the future of facilitating workshops and improving consultation impact and scalability in a remote world, so we focus on finding what works, we are non-judgmental, curious and tentative, rather than absolute in our sharing.
Let us know if you would like to join our expert network or take part in the Learning Community.
