It is December, which officially marks the end of the year, there is no doubt about that. And even if you managed to save 2024 or not, a topic I have already discussed before, you should have started thinking about planning for 2025. The ideal is that you have already started, but regardless of where you are in this process, I will 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. It's pretty obvious, isn't it? However, what I see most are companies refusing to do that.
The fact is that when people do not refuse to look back, they make this assessment quickly and poorly. After all, they think it's easier to let the boat go. Even what went well is not used to consolidate some of these good practices; we just celebrate and that's it. In other words, we missed the opportunity to learn both from what worked and from what definitely did not.
To know where the errors are, we need to understand the details of the executions, but we know that a manager, given so many tasks, often cannot be aware of absolutely everything, so there's nothing better than hearing the employees' opinions about what was done during the year, as they are on the front line. The team needs to be playing together in building ideas; otherwise, this is already a point to be fixed.
The big problem is that when we don't realize or worse, don't accept that it went wrong, we end up persisting in something that doesn't go anywhere and probably has no future. It's like we're hitting a knife's edge. And starting a new year with this mindset is not good for you and even less for your business, which needs consistent planning.
For this reason, if your company still does not use OKRs – Objectives and Key Results – perhaps the perfect time has come to implement them. However, be very careful, OKRs are not just an Excel spreadsheet that you follow and give acheckin what he completed. The tool requires a precise implementation to truly work.
Look carefully at the available data: what do the metrics tell you? Why did certain actions not achieve the expected result? Was there a lack of planning? Were the hypotheses not validated? The team tried, tried, but went in the wrong direction? There are many questions that may arise at this moment, but looking at well-constructed OKRs makes this learning process easier.
Therefore, when planning for 2025, instead of thinking in a single annual cycle, keep in mind to repeat this process every quarter, as one of the tool's premises is short cycles that allow for quicker recalculations, without losing sight of the medium and long term. In this way, you will accelerate your organization's learning process and create a more structured plan for the next year.
What should I consider when planning for 2025?
