33 | Intention setting - The questions to use to kickstart your planning

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Meanwhile, here are some questions you can use to kickstart your intention setting and planning: 

Reflection – Personal (within the business) – Based on Simon Sinek’s Why X 5

1. Why do you do what you do? You could do nearly anything nearly anywhere but this is what you chose. I.e., You do what you do not just for a paycheck. You do what you do here because it matters to you – you want to tap into what that reason is.
2. Why do you care about that?
3. What difference does this work make? In the world, in the community, in the lives of those you interact with?
4. Why is that difference important? To you, to others…
5. Why does that matter to you? *This is your Why – the deeper value-based reason for why you each individually and collectively do what you do in this company. 

Reflection – As a team, company

• What were the biggest lessons learned this past year? What do you know now that you didn’t know this time last year?
  • Think about the challenges that were “investments” of pain, resources, heart aches that you don’t want to have to “re-learn” in the future.
  • What works that we definitely want to keep doing?
• What were our clients’ lessons learned about us? And how do we know that to be true (vs. anecdotal) – quotes/testimonials, metrics?
• Looking back at 2023, what dominant theme (or emotion) represents this year?  

Intention – Answer this both personally and as a team/company

• Looking forward to 2024, imagining us at this time next year, what do we want our dominant them (or emotion) to be? Checking in - Does this intention honor / align with each of our Why’s?
• What do we want our clients’ experience of us to be? What do we want them to tell their friends and colleagues about us?
• How will we know when we’ve achieved that? SMART goals / KPIs, team morale/retention, what clients will say… *This becomes the definition of success*
• If we do this and only this – will we be successful? You want to be able to make it simple to say no to all the other non-essential ideas and opportunities that will come up. Clarifying and narrowing the definition of success sets future you up for simpler decision making.

Planning - Putting intention into action

• What would make our success inevitable?
• What are the most resource efficient and smartest ways to get us there based on what we know now? Make sure each idea has a clear, SMART hypothesis so it will be easy to know when an action does / not work.  
• Are there any opportunities to streamline our focus?  
• What methods of encouragement and accountability seem like the best fit?