My Favorite Planning Hack: Run the Machine vs. Improve the Machine

Read Time: 2 minutes.

Most leaders are terrible planners.

• They overinvest in false precision.

• They overcommit their teams.

Then their team comes up short. But instead of diagnosing why, they start their overly optimistic planning process all over again.

The most valuable thing teams can do during planning is choose. Commit. Be clear on what truly matters.

But deciding is hard.

One simple framework that helped me:

Run the Machine vs. Improve the Machine.

Run the Machine

This is why your function exists. The core value you're supposed to add.

• For sales: new customers.

• For engineers: quality code.

• For customer service: satisfaction.

Think of your team as a factory. Run is what your factory produces.

It's operational. It's the heartbeat.

For Run, you need to know two things:

1. How is success measured? You need clear KPIs to know how well you’re succeeding. And to evaluate which Improve projects will have the impact you want.

2. What is your capacity model? You need to know the level of output you can produce with your current team. If you’re already devoting 110% capacity to just operations, how can you expect anything to improve?

Improve the Machine

These are the upgrades. How you improve the KPIs of Run.

• Increase speed.

• Higher quality.

• Lower costs.

Most teams can generate a nearly unlimited list of improvement projects. The key is selecting the ones with the highest ROI.

The highest ROI usually lives in two places:

1. High Impact, Low Cost
If you can get huge gains with minimal investment, stop debating and make the change. Fix the problem. Train the team.

2. The Bottleneck
There's always one thing throttling your team's output. Identify and solve that problem, and you typically unlock a new level of productivity.

The key isn’t coming up with the list.

The key is having the courage to say No to almost everything on it.

Your Next Move

Ask yourself two questions:

1. What is our Run? What is this team's factory supposed to produce? What KPI is most important for me to positively impact?

2. What is our Improve? What single constraint is limiting our output? How can I free up the capacity to make that change?

Then stop planning and start breaking the bottleneck.

More impact, less analysis.

What You Missed This Week

Our Monday AM posts:

📌 7 Ways to Handle a Micromanager (Dave on LI)
📌 Its Never Too Late (Mar on LI)
📌 The Planning Trap (Dave on X)

And here are our most popular posts last week:

🔥 8 Cognitive Biases That Trick All of Us (Mar on LI)
🔥 12 Quiet Lessons That Changed How I Think (Dave on LI)

And this one seemed to stir up quite the conversation:

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You can help us by reposting anything that resonates with you.  

Thank you for reading. Appreciate you!

Dave