Planning Backwards: Reach Your Goals with Military Planning
Want to move forward? Plan backwards.
What happens when you WFH with a former Secretary of Defense, like our founder? You learn military planning. And borrow it IRL. It's called planning backwards, and it worked for D-Day, when weather (and moons and tides) created a finite window for the Allied Forces’ amphibious landing in France. With a date and an objective, planners worked their way backwards, doing everything in their power to deliver a positive outcome. Was there plenty of nail-biting between 1943 when they started planning and June 6, 1944? You bet. But they were undeterred from doing the things within their reach. In times of uncertainty, planning forward is a fool’s errand. Instead, let’s start with setting an intention toward what we want, when—then work our way back with manageable steps and tangible actions.
Download our worksheet & examples HERE.
Find your shiny object. Pick an outcome (one or more) in any realm of life. If you run a business, you might want to look at a less optimal outcome, a reasonable outcome and a reach outcome—and plan for all three. You win some, you lose some—and even the defeats need planning so chips fall in the best possible spot.
Take five. That’s five things you, yourself and you will need to do to reach your goal—independently of outside forces. Things most certainly won’t go as planned (even D-Day was postponed by a day), but any hiccups will not be on you, since you’ll have done everything you could.
Line ‘em up. Sequence your five things. Put the tasks that would benefit from more info (engaging your well-honed research skills) further out in the sequence.
Break it down. For the first thing on your list, identify the next, tangible action for you to take. This is the surest way we know to tackle overwhelm—most big things are really a bunch of small things getting done. Tackling the small things step by step will keep your momentum going.
In June, we held our first Plan Backwards virtual event and your positive feedback was all the validation we needed for the strategy’s impact. Stay tuned for the next: Planning Backwards for Parents.
