I was discussing that famous quote the other day: ‘If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.’ I found myself wanting to add a lot of caveats around it, which would no doubt irritate the manufacturers of those posters and postcards of pithy quotes that sell so well.
Plans are important, but we also need to recognise that things can change so they need to be consistently reviewed and this sometimes means we need to set a new course.
This doesn’t mean what you started with was wrong, it’s just different now for a reason. The way in which we react to change helps to determine our success.
Many things can change, not least factors totally outside of our control, and there’s nothing like a Spending Review and a global pandemic to have a bit of an impact on all of us!
Our medium-term financial planning is just that, a plan with many moving parts. All of us are having to revise, review and renew assumptions that we previously made in a world that looked very different from now.
It’s been interesting having many conversations with others about ‘What’s the number?’, ‘What’s the gap?’ as if there is only one scenario that is playing out.
Over the next six months, and, trying to set a budget for the future, things will be moving quicker than ever.
The thread running through this isn’t that version one was wrong when you are looking at version five, it is that in version five you have new information, something has changed or been refined that you didn’t know at version one.
Our skills at navigating through this though are being able to describe those changes, explain why the plan has changed and to give reassurance that we are still focused on success.
Adele Taylor is director of resources at Windsor & Maidenhead RLBC