October is here, and with it comes strategic planning season. Every fall, I see leaders open their dashboards to prepare for the year ahead. That is a good habit. However, numbers only tell part of the story. They remain essential, so I simply invite you to read them with a wider lens: the people who produce them.
In this article, I therefore offer three questions to add to your strategic planning for 2027. They will help you see what your numbers leave out: how your team thinks, feels and acts.
What your dashboards leave out
Your dashboards are valuable. Indeed, they show your revenue, your expenses, your profit and the cash in your bank account. They tell you where your business stands. On the other hand, they rarely tell you why.
Let’s take an example. Your business receives a lot of requests from potential clients. On paper, that is great news. Yet if most of those requests do not match your services, your team loses hours sorting through them. The number looks good, but it hides a problem.
Here is another example. Someone on your team reaches their goals less often. The first reflex is to think they lack effort. In reality, the cause is often elsewhere: too many administrative tasks, not enough work to do, or a role that fits them poorly.
In short, a number shows a result. To find the cause, you need to look at the people behind that number. If you also want to benchmark your results, a free tool exists. The Government of Canada offers Financial Performance Data, which lets you compare your numbers with those of profitable businesses in your industry.
Three human questions for your strategic planning
Now, here are three questions to add to your strategic planning. Each one relates to one of the 3 parts of the mind: cognitive, affective and conative.
1. Cognitive: what are your decisions based on?
The cognitive part is how we think and how we decide. First, every decision starts from a point of view. Yours depends on your role, your experience and the information that reaches you. As a result, the more limited that point of view, the more costly the decision can become.
That is why, before you set your 2027 goals, I invite you to ask your team what they see from where they stand. Often, someone close to the work sees a problem long before it shows up in the numbers. Explore this further in our article on organizational blind spots.
2. Affective: your team’s preferences
The affective part is what we like, what draws us in and what motivates us. In fact, preferences are present everywhere: in roles, in projects and in goals. When people work on what they prefer, their engagement rises. Conversely, when their preferences are set aside for too long, their interest drops.
In your strategic planning, I therefore suggest one simple question: who on your team wants to lead which projects in 2027? The answer will help you assign roles more wisely.
3. Conative: everyone’s natural strengths
The conative part is our natural way of taking action. Some people need to analyze everything before they move. Others prefer to try right away and adjust along the way. Each approach is a strength.
However, a task done against one’s instinct comes at a cost. It takes more energy, more time and more effort. So when you assign your 2027 projects, it is worth looking at how each person naturally takes action. What they know how to do matters, and how they act matters just as much.
Fatigue, a valuable signal for your strategic planning
At SPCTE, we add an indicator that few people measure: fatigue. When people often work against their natural strengths, they wear out. To understand where fatigue comes from, we look at the 3 parts of the mind: cognitive, affective and conative, to improve both performance and people’s health.
In fact, there are three kinds of fatigue: cognitive, affective and conative. Each one appears when the matching part is poorly orchestrated. Fatigue thus becomes an indicator as useful as your numbers. It shows you where to look. By paying attention to it, you can act early, while your best people still have the energy to build 2027 with you.
Your three questions for strategic planning 2027
Here are the three questions to keep close during your strategic planning meeting:
- Cognitive: what information are our decisions based on, and who sees what I do not?
- Affective: who on the team wants to lead which projects?
- Conative: for each project, which person naturally acts the way the project needs?
These questions complete your numbers. Above all, they help you understand what is happening behind them. Moreover, they often open conversations your team has been waiting to have for a long time.
The hidden cost of strategic planning without the human side
A tired team is costly, even when results look good. Decisions take longer, projects move more slowly and fixes keep adding up. Yet this cost rarely appears in a financial report.
This cost is hard to see on paper. That is why, in the HI Decoded training, we let people experience it through games rather than explain it.
A right hand to read both the numbers and the people
Reading numbers and reading people require two different perspectives. Many leaders carry both alone, on top of everything else. As I explain in when the founder becomes the ceiling, they do not have to.
That is exactly the role we take on as a fractional COO, GM or EOS® Integrator. As your right hand, we connect your results to the people who produce them. Then, we help you build a strategic planning process that takes both into account.
Are you preparing your strategic planning for 2027 and want to do it differently? Book a free strategy call.
