5 practical thinking tools you can use for every type of planl

It’s as simple as a grocery store visit with a list of items you need to buy.

You plan out projects at work and at home. Sometimes the plan is created on the fly, sometimes it’s a process.

5 practical thinking tools you can use for every type of plan is Assumptions, why, Anticipatory Thinking, What If and Preeminent Metrics.

Here’s the Steps:

1. We naturally make Assumptions about the future. We pretty much make assumptions about everything and anything and quite often the outcome is not quite often what we expected.

2. Clarity on the assumptions you’re making, ask Why you’re making those assumptions. For example, If I go for X what if it doesn’t happen and I fail? Why would you assume it won’t happen, and you would fail? The answers to why come in the form of what you have heard, read experienced, and known facts from experienced people in that field. The more information you have that supports the assumptions you make, the higher your confidence will be in those assumptions, Clarity equals confidence!

3. With confident assumptions, you Anticipate the future state and can form an action plan. For example: given the assumption that you can achieve X, you can then anticipate the probability of success. Or given the assumption that what you are trying to achieve is attainable and it has been done before. You would anticipate this is possible.

4. Challenge your plan by asking What If? What if the assumptions you’ve made about the future are not correct? How does that change your plan? This might generate a contingent plan (a.k.a. Plan B). What if that goal doesn’t get achieved … maybe it might not work? Well, What if it does work?

5. Preeminent Metrics – What can you measure, track, observe, or watch that will provide insight that the assumptions you’ve made are, or are not, still good ones as you execute your plan. This becomes an invaluable trigger … if the assumptions that drive your plan change, then this is cause to review your plan to ensure that you’re still executing towards a confident future. For example, a preeminent metric that might allow you to understand what you’re looking to achieve is very achievable and possible by getting sound advice from other people who have achieved it.

Note: Getting advice from people that haven’t successfully achieved what you are looking to do is not advised.

Of course, you can’t plan for every possible outcome, so you have to look at some of the most probable outcomes based on the most confident assumptions. With a set of Preeminent Metrics, you can track those assumptions and if they turn out to be different, you can make a change earlier enough to compensate.

Summary:

Planning is about making Assumptions about the future, understanding Why you’re making those assumptions, being confident in them, then using Anticipatory Thinking to create a set of action items based on those assumptions, and then using a set of Preeminent Metrics that lets you know if you’re on track or need to revise the plan with some of your What If scenarios.