2021 Here We Come
What good planning looks like when the ground keeps shifting — and what senior leaders should hold onto going into a new year with more unknowns than usual.
This was written at the start of January 2021. The vaccines were being administered, the new year felt tentatively like a turning point, and most of the leaders I was speaking with were somewhere between cautious optimism and exhausted realism. The uncertainty that had defined 2020 had not ended. It had changed shape.
I am leaving this piece here because the question it addresses — how to plan when you cannot rely on the future to hold still — did not stop being relevant when 2021 arrived, or when it ended. It is a permanent feature of senior leadership, not a temporary condition created by unusual events. The particular texture of that January is specific. The underlying challenge is not.
The new year planning problem
The traditional new-year planning cycle assumes a kind of stability that most organisations no longer have. You review last year's results, identify the gaps, set targets for the year ahead, and cascade them down through the organisation. The process is familiar and produces documents that look authoritative. The problem is that the assumptions built into most annual plans — about market conditions, team continuity, customer behaviour, operational context — were, by January 2021, demonstrably fragile.
That did not mean planning was pointless. It meant the form of planning needed to change.
The senior leaders I spoke with who navigated 2020 most effectively were not the ones with the most detailed plans. They were the ones who had been clearest about what they were actually trying to achieve, clear enough to know which elements of their approach were load-bearing and which were adjustable. When the circumstances changed — and they changed repeatedly — those leaders could adapt because they knew what they were adapting from. Leaders with detailed plans but fuzzy underlying intentions had a different problem: they had a lot of specific commitments whose logic had evaporated, and a great deal of energy going into either defending or apologising for them.
What to hold onto
Going into 2021, the question I kept asking in coaching conversations was: what are the two or three things that absolutely need to be true at the end of this year, whatever else happens?
Not ten things, not a full set of objectives. Two or three. The things that, if you got them right, would make the year a success regardless of what else the year threw at you. This is not a new planning idea — it is a very old one — but it became newly important in conditions where the detailed plans could not be trusted to survive contact with events.
For some leaders, the answer was about the team: keeping the core team intact, building enough trust and communication capacity to handle whatever came. For others it was about a specific business question — a key relationship, a particular capability gap, a market position that needed securing. For others it was about their own leadership: they had recognised in 2020 that they had been operating with too little capacity, and one of the non-negotiables was finding a way to maintain their own functioning at a higher level than the previous year had allowed.
The specific answers varied. The discipline of identifying them — and then subordinating the annual planning to them, rather than the other way around — was consistent among the leaders who found the process most useful.
The leadership question that mattered most
If I had to identify the single most important leadership question coming out of 2020, it would be this: are you leading your team, or are you managing the situation?
The distinction matters. Managing the situation means responding to what is in front of you — dealing with the immediate problem, containing the immediate risk, making the immediate decision. It is necessary work. It is not, on its own, leadership. Leadership requires maintaining a view of where you are trying to get to, communicating that view clearly enough that the people around you can make their own decisions in alignment with it, and building the conditions in which the team can do their best work over an extended period, not just in a crisis.
The conditions of 2020 pulled most leaders strongly toward situation management. That was understandable. But by January 2021, a year into a sustained period of disruption, the organisations that had fared best were the ones where the senior leaders had found ways to keep doing both — to manage what needed managing and to maintain some coherence about direction, team, and culture that was not simply a reaction to events.
The planning exercise worth doing
Before setting the targets, before the spreadsheets, before the strategy documents: sit with a blank piece of paper and answer these questions.
- What did you learn about your own leadership in the past year that you want to carry forward?
- What did you learn about your team that changes how you will lead them this year?
- What are the two or three things that absolutely need to be true at the end of this year?
- What are you personally going to stop doing in order to make room for what the year needs?
That last question is the one people skip. New year planning is usually about additions — new goals, new initiatives, new targets. The capacity question — what existing claim on your time and attention needs to stop, or reduce significantly, to free up the resource for what matters — rarely gets the same rigour.
It should. A plan that adds without subtracting is usually a plan to be slightly more stressed and slightly less effective. The subtraction conversation is harder than the addition conversation because it involves saying no to things, and sometimes to people, who have legitimate claims on you. But it is the conversation that distinguishes planning from wishful thinking.
Looking forward
I wrote this piece with a mixture of tiredness and genuine optimism about what 2021 might produce. Some of that optimism was warranted. Some was not. Looking back from where we are now, what strikes me most is how much of what felt like a temporary emergency — the uncertainty, the remote working, the volatility of team dynamics, the constant adaptation — has become a permanent feature of the landscape senior leaders work in.
Which means the habits the best leaders built in that period — of holding direction lightly, communicating clearly under conditions of incomplete information, maintaining their own functioning through sustained difficulty — have turned out to be permanent assets rather than temporary coping mechanisms.
If any of this connects to questions you are working on, the How We Can Help page describes the kinds of challenges leaders most commonly bring to coaching. You might also find it useful to read about what executive coaching actually involves. And if you want to talk, email [email protected].