Strategic Resolutions and New Year’s Planning

Based on many of my newsletters, it’s time for New Year’s Resolutions! And I’m going to follow the herd and write about them too. I’d like to come at it from a slightly different perspective though and suggest the reason most people think resolutions are useless, and those who still try to make changes at this time year fai,l is the reason most organizations fail at strategic planning. According to my unscientific survey, approximately 98.5% of all humans have been part of a strategic plan process that takes a lot of time and effort and “ends up on the shelf.” In other words, organizations start out with good intentions, but the people doing the work don’t have the necessary time, energy, or support systems to accomplish the goals. As I was thinking about my own goals here at the start of the year, I realized these two processes are similar.

Again, based on a highly unscientific survey, people use a variety of methods for New Year’s resolutions. Of course, there are the traditional goals such as, “I want to losie X amount of weight in Y amount of time”. We generally give up when that chart doesn’t show linear progress. Other versions range from choosing one word to represent a host of things to work on, to themes to reflections (no, I’m not sure what’s different here.) Or Matthew Dick’s version of fifty-ish very specific things to accomplish over the course of a year. (He posted yesterday that over 14 years of doing this practice, his completion rate is 55.5% which, when you think about it, probably is a significantly higher percentage than most people.)

In our work world we have also tried a variety of methods over the years to do our work efficiently and to meet goals. How many of you have lived through Management by Objectives and fishbone charts or learned Six Sigma or learned about FISH from the Pike’s Market folks who throw fish to each other? I’ve just learned about OKRs and KPIs. Key Performance Indicators is a term I’ve heard for a while, but Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) was new to me. Each of these ideas have something to teach us, but they seem to flow by every few years. I don’t have any clue what the percentage is for successful implementation of a strategic plan, but I bet the 50/50 mark is a good guess.

On the topic of strategic planning, I was a skeptic for the first half of my career but my time at UTSA taught me to appreciate strategic planning done well. And one of the most important elements for successful strategic planning and I suspect for successful resolution accomplishment is the accountability and tracking of the work being done. That planning and accountability makes budgeting easier and gives us credibility when we ask for more resources. We can show where we’ve spent our time, where we’ve made a difference, and therefore why we need more of something, whether that need is space, people, or money – the three most precious resources in most organizations.

Weight loss researchers know the power of tracking what we eat. It helps us be more mindful in our eating and our dietary choices. Saying “I’ll eat better” is not much of a guide. It’s certainly not a plan. Anyone who’s tried to learn a new skill knows that it works better to plan to practice a set number of hours a week instead of saying you’ll do it regularly. Regularly is too squishy. Three times a week for thirty minutes, now that’s a plan. It’s something we can track. Speaking for myself, my resolutions have been squishy most of the time. And for all the interesting ideas in the one word and the theme versions of resolutions, when I’ve tried either concept, I forgot my idea somewhere in the first quarter.

So I’m going to give Matthew Dicks’ idea a try this year. Several very specific goals that are stretch goals and plans to accomplish them. They will take sustained effort to achieve, but like a strategic plan the idea is not to accomplish everything in the first quarter, but to create change through consistent effort over time. I don’t know what it will be like, but as I move into a new way of working called semi-retirement, I feel the need to create some internal accountability when the external work clocks and rhythms won’t be the same anymore. I’m working on the final set of goals and I’ll share them next week and then I’ll have to share how I’m doing every month. How’s that for accountability and transparency?

If you do New Year’s resolutions in any style, what have you decided and how will you keep yourself on track for the year? If you don’t do resolutions at the change of the calendar, how do you work to move yourself forward on things you care about? I’d love to hear from you and whatever you do or don’t do at this start of 2024, best of luck and Happiest of New Years to us all!

Take care,

Gage