When someone mentions business planning, we have been conditioned to think about writing a business plan. There are hundreds of books and articles, tons of software, an army of consultants, and a multitude of government programs to help you write a business plan. There are virtually no resources to help you set up what today’s business environment really demands - a continuous process, the planning system underway.

A commonly accepted theory is that for a company to survive and thrive, we must be flexible and agile. It must be capable of transformed overnight as conditions warrant. Having written five-year plan is not part of this picture. In fact, trying to follow a long-term plan during the ravages change is not logical. It is applying linear thinking to a non-linear. It just does not work.

Having a formal, written business plan is so accepted as being crucial to success that there are few studies or surveys to test this assumption. If such business plans have been a wonderful thing, there would be a significant difference between successful and the companies that have them and those who do not. Interviews of 100 setting up business on 1989s “INC 500″ list of the fastest growing private companies in the United States only 28 percent had “real” business plans. In 1993, AT & T Small Business study found that 59 percent of small businesses that grew over the previous two years used a formal business plan. A 1994 survey of the country’s fastest growing companies found 23 percent had no business plan. “The relationship between writing business plans and the failure of small businesses in the United States”, by Dr. Stephen Perry, polled 152 failed and 152 non-failed small businesses in 1997. He found that 64 per cent of the companies have not had no written business plan. He also found that non-failed firms had more extensive written that the plans have not companies, 23 percent, compared to 9 cent respectively.

As you can see the results of studies and surveys are all across the board and proves nothing. Clearly, a significant percentage of successful businesses do not have a written business plan. None of these studies reveal the nature of the process that created the plan. Was it the result of an annual process with a few updates and ongoing continuous process? As Professor Albert Shapero, “The companies that provide do better than companies that do not, but they never follow their plan.”

The emphasis should be on the PROCESS not on the map. If a continual, ongoing planning process is in place, a written business plan is just not important. Writing a business plan without a planning system in place is a massive effort that is very rare. Many companies write three to five year plans and update them every year. The plans are reviewed periodically during each year to analyze the plan deviations from reality. Little, if any, thought is given to strategy between the annual updates. Strategy should be the focus of every day. Setting up a planning system allows and sometimes forces you to focus on strategy.

A planning system consists of two functions. One is a goal-setting and implementation processes, and the other is a tendency to look or environment scanning process. Setting up a planning system takes several steps. The first task is to set aside or take the time to plan on a regular basis on a continuous basis. It should be part of your routine, not an occasional event that can easily be postponed. In the evaluation phase, the owner or management team and the company are analyzed. From the analysis, key or critical areas of the business are identified. These areas are filtered to focus on the most important ones. Performance Measures are determined and systems to collect and process the necessary data are set up, if necessary. A basis of the current performance is used to set goals.

Now the regular, ongoing stuff begins. The strategies are developed, tested, implemented, monitored, and reworked until the objectives are achieved. Each planning session is split between working on strategies and trend watching. As goals are achieved, the goal setting and strategy formulation process begins again.

Let’s put the emphasis where it back on continuity, the ongoing planning instead of writing business plans. As Karl Albrecht said in his book Corporate Radar, “The majority is not always right, the conventional wisdom is not always wise, and the doctrine may be flawed. The most fashionable an idea, the more it is likely to be exempt from critical evaluation. Breakthrough thinking sometimes contradictory calls for the most widely held assumptions and beliefs. “