Yesterday I opened a client's 2021 annual brand plan to check a positioning line, and the file had not been touched since January 14th of last year. Not modified. Not commented on. Untouched for eleven months and three weeks by a team of nine people who all attended the offsite where it was approved.
Today they are locking the 2022 one.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I have built the decks myself, so I want to be careful here. The annual plan is not useless. The process of writing it forces a group of people to say out loud what they believe about their category, and that is worth the two weeks it costs. But almost nobody is honest about which part is the value.
The document is not the value. The argument that produced the document is the value, and the document is a very expensive receipt for a conversation.
An annual plan that is never reopened is not a strategy, it is a ritual: a thing a company does in December so it can feel prepared for a year it has no ability to predict.
You can tell the ritual from the strategy by asking one question. What would have to happen for us to change this? If the answer is a shrug, you wrote a ritual. If the answer is specific, a competitor launching, a channel's economics shifting, a supply constraint, then you have something with a nervous system.
Three things make a plan survive contact with the actual year. One, name the three bets, not the thirty initiatives, because a document with thirty initiatives is a document nobody can disagree with and therefore nobody has to believe. Two, write down what you expect to be true by April, in numbers, so that being wrong is visible rather than absorbed. Three, put a date on the calendar right now, in April, to reread the thing with the whole group, and treat that meeting as real work rather than a status update.
Patagonia is the example everyone reaches for and for once it holds up, because their positioning is durable enough to survive a year but their tactics get relitigated constantly. The stable thing is high and the flexible thing is low. Most annual plans do the reverse: vague at the top, rigid underneath.
The document is not the value. The argument that produced the document is the value, and the document is a very expensive receipt for a conversation.
Book the April meeting. That is the whole intervention. It costs an hour and it converts a ritual into a practice.
Then go home. It is the first real week of January, it is dark at four thirty in Portland, and my cats have made no plans at all for 2022 and are going to have a tremendous year regardless.