Let's One Page Everything!
I know that the idea of One Page "X" for business has been touted for quite some time but it seems to be all the rage again, at least in the Blog and Twittersphere that I have been hanging out in lately, a quick search of the One Page world shows that there are:
and the list goes on (see an entire compilation at Amazon). There are even entire works of Shakespeare printed on one page, but that is probably a different discussion.
So, why are people working so hard to get everything down to One Page?
Simply because so many things have been made too darn complicated.
In our area, strategic planning and strategic plan implementation, we like to say that somewhere along the line the MBA's and Academics hijacked the whole strategic planning process and made it too complicated for people to do without an incredible amount of angst (see recent blog post "Strategic planning is boring .... exciting .... useless .... essential").
Once the intellectuals start driving the agenda, watch out, everything is likely to become 3 times as complex and will mostly like take 3 times longer to complete. Now, I am not here to blame them it's in their nature, business actitivities are interesting areas to study and hypothesize on but at some point the rest of the us need to take back the agenda so that we can actually Get Something Done.
So, what is the essence of One Pagers and how can it be applied in strategic planning?
In short, break things down into manageable components , manageable in both understanding as well as in the ability to complete. Take the standard strategic plan as an example:
- Simple explanations - things need to be clear to every level of person in an organization - in the case of strategic planning it can be things such as, explaining that you want to grow market share, and the 2-3 things that will make a difference in that quest; the right customers, high satisfaction levels, existing customers driving new customer aquisition. Express the ideas in such a way that it is easy to understand even to people not in your organization
- Key Elements - group things in ways that they relate well - I've seen some strategic plans that were as long as 30-40 pages and seemed to go on forever, brilliant work and very thorough, but completely unable to be implemented! When I see something like this I just say "stop, what is the most important issue facing you today" You then take that issue and fix it first then on to the next most important. People can only manage a few things well, having 30 or 40 pages of well meaning activities means that "nothing" is key and that just won't work
- Simple Actions - the final and most important item in the One Page concept - People, it's all about the actions, once you have broken down the complexity you should have this nice little one page cheat sheet on actions. If you only have a few key elements to work on then you should only have a few actions to complete for each. The actions should be so clear that you could stop any one of your colleagues walking down the hallway and they should be able to rattle off those actions without hesitation.
In summary, we love the concept of One Page Everything, it makes sense, the key is to make it doable and make it memorizable.
Ed Loessi
