Start in a Different Place, End in a Better Place.

The trouble with traditional planning approaches is that the destination is the exclusive determining factor of whether the plan was successful.  Effective and potent planning is about more than where you end up; it’s about where you start.When your starting point is determining your core values, your vision and your mission then a plan can be much more powerful. And that point is key, because once meaningful planning takes place then you can begin to measure success.Reflect on this for a moment: The way you define something as either a problem or an opportunity will also determine the path you take to evaluate whether it has been successful.For example: a loss in a private equity investment by a family may sound more like a “problem” than an “opportunity”, but what if their true goal was to give their children some investment autonomy? Was the investment a success or a failure? If this situation were being judged solely on financial return, then it would be a failure. But if the starting point was to enable the kids to develop their financial muscle, then their final evaluation of the situation would be based on the new skills they had acquired and how they managed to work through the loss together.The key take away here is that in order to travel in the right direction and to properly evaluate results it is important to have clarity into what you’re trying to accomplish in the first place.  If you start in the right place, you can end up in a better place.