The trouble when making a 3-year plan is, without structure you don’t know where you are going.
More importantly, you want to be confident the path you are taking will get you there. Too much structure means no room for dynamic changes and flexibility. Too little and you don’t get there. The latter is particularly deadly since it provides the forecast the Cheshire cat gave Alice.
Your 3-Year Plan (our recommendation, a 3HAG – 3 Year Highly Achievable Goal) should have enough structure to give you confidence, and enough flexibility, that if market dynamics change you can adjust. In today’s marketplace, you can just about guarantee the market will change.
When You Know Where You’re Going, You Know You’re Great
In developing your 3HAG, building your swimlanes comes after you’ve mapped out your marketplace, determined what your company’s unique and valuable position will be within your marketplace, mapped your company internally, established who Your Core Customer is, and created a view of where you're positioned against your competitors(Key Attribution Framework).
This gives the leadership team a clear perspective on the company’s present and future and brings a powerful sense of clarity your team previously lacked.
“Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.” —Vince Lombardi
Clarity turns into confidence, and confidence influences your entire team.
As Shannon notes in 3HAG WAY: The Strategic Execution System that ensures your strategy is not a Wild-Ass-Guess!, “Since strategic execution planning is an iterative process, you get better and sharper each time you convene back in your war room, and everyone feels the power of being confident about the company’s direction.”
SWIMLANES
You want to have a 3HAG so you can easily explain the how: how exactly you’re going to execute your strategy now through the next twelve quarters.
Swimlanes are project management processes and jargon. Any project you’re planning should have them.
Why would you not do this with the biggest and riskiest project you would ever face—your company? Have your leadership team take each of the 3-5 differentiators from the
Then create a six-row by twelve-column grid on a wall and get some large sticky notes. Each row is a Swimlane for one of your differentiators; and in each quarter, add in the key milestones on a sticky note. Line this up for all your differentiators. Now you can see the whole path—the good, the bad, and the ugly. You need to achieve these key capabilities and differentiators. You now have the milestones or benchmarks clarified along the path to 3 years to reach them.
One best practice is to start with the end in mind. You can start with the 36th-month column in the very left hand or at the right hand, but either way, finish this column first. What’s your vision of what this will look like when you finally reach your 36-month goal?
In terms of your differentiators, developing your Activity Fit Map is another way to identify your benchmarks, by getting more granular on how you are going to achieve your differentiating actions.
We’ll share Activity Fit Maps with several examples next blog.
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The Activity Fit Map allows you to lay out what should go in your swim lanes. Your Activity Fit Map challenges your ideas, provides great discussion in your leadership team, helping you determine what you should and shouldn’t compete on. We’ll explore Activity Fit Maps for Southwest Airlines and Ikea to help you understand the concept better in, next blog.