It’s December, which officially marks the end of the year—there’s no doubt about that. And whether you’ve managed to save 2024 or not (a topic I’ve discussed before), you’ve probably started thinking about planning for 2025. Ideally, you should have already begun, but wherever you are in this process, I’ll help you with some points you should consider.
The first thing I recommend you do may seem simple at first, but few people do this exercise correctly: learn from what happened over the past year to truly understand what actually worked and, most importantly, what went wrong. Pretty obvious, right? However, what I see most often is companies refusing to do this.
The fact is that when people don’t refuse to look back, they do this evaluation quickly and poorly. After all, they think it’s easier to let things slide. Even what went right ends up not being leveraged to consolidate any of these good practices—we just celebrate and move on. In other words, we miss the opportunity to learn both from what worked and what definitely didn’t.
To know where the mistakes are, we need to understand the details of execution. But we know that a manager, faced with so many tasks, often can’t be aware of absolutely everything. So, there’s nothing better than listening to employees’ opinions about what was done during the year—they’re on the front lines. The team needs to be playing together in building ideas; otherwise, that’s already a point to fix.
The big problem is that when we don’t realize—or worse, don’t accept—that something went wrong, we end up persisting in something that isn’t moving forward and probably has no future. It’s like hitting your head against a brick wall. Starting a new year with this mindset isn’t good for you, let alone your business, which needs consistent planning.
For this reason, if your company doesn’t yet use OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—perhaps now is the perfect time to implement them. However, be very careful: OKRs aren’t just an Excel spreadsheet you follow and mark a check on what you’ve completed. The tool requires precise implementation to truly work.
Look carefully at the available data: what do the metrics tell you? Why didn’t certain actions achieve the expected results? Was there a lack of planning? Were hypotheses not validated? Did the team try and try but go in the wrong direction? Many questions may arise at this moment, but well-structured OKRs make this learning process easier.
Therefore, when planning for 2025, instead of thinking of a single annual cycle, keep in mind repeating this process every quarter. One of the tool’s premises is short cycles, allowing you to recalculate the route more quickly without losing sight of the medium and long term. This way, you’ll accelerate your organization’s learning process and create a more structured plan for the next year.
What should I consider when planning for 2025?
