North Star

You have been creating and getting plans executed over a 1 year time frame.  But given nature of task, you need focus to be much more longer term.

How do you go about creating this longer term focus while maintaining current year focus too?

You could create a ‘North Star’ – that team will work towards in longer run. Flip side of this is that only intention might not lead to actions needed today to move towards ‘North Star’.

On other hand, you could ensure alignment of yearly plans to ‘North Star’. That will ensure there is some ‘coupling’ of yearly plans to ‘North Star’.

Maybe this is a good approach to start integrating a longer term focus into yearly plans.

Once this approach has got seeded in, you might want to start building ‘scenarios’/’milestones’ – how will outcomes look like periodically – 1/2/3 years down the line? What should be focus in year 2, year 3, etc?

So while you have stronger execution plans in place for current year, you start building execution plans in place for other years – with space for periodic check-ins – to evaluate whether there’s a need for change in year 2/3 plans.

In all of this, there’s a consistent assumption. ‘If task at hand requires a longer term focus, then that focus should get reflected in your shorter term execution plans too’.

Balancing this dichotomy of shorter term v/s longer term is turning out to be very interesting. J

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Sourav