Somebody duplicated a folder on Monday morning. Q3 Planning, sitting on the drive next to Q2 Planning, sitting next to Q1 Planning, three folders in a row like a very boring family portrait.
I opened all three. It was the same deck. Same four audience segments, same three brand pillars, same slide fourteen titled Where We Win. The dates had been retyped. One chart had been recolored, teal to a slightly different teal.
This is the first week of July, which means every brand team and every agency in the country is running a half-year replan, and a startling number of them are doing exactly that.
A replan that does not change anything you believe is not a plan, it is a calendar with formatting.
The problem is that most planning documents never write down a belief in the first place. They write down activities. Activities cannot be wrong, they can only be late, so the July review becomes a status meeting in a nicer font. Nobody has to say the sentence that matters, which is: in January we assumed X, and X turned out to be false.
So make the assumptions explicit and the ritual starts doing work. One, list what you believed in January in plain language. Our buyer is price sensitive. Retail partners will carry the new line. Our category grows in summer. Two, mark each one confirmed, broken, or still unknown, and put a name next to who checked. Three, and this is the part everyone skips, delete something. A plan that only adds is not a plan, it is a wish list with a budget attached.
The brands that hold their shape do this constantly. Patagonia has walked away from revenue it could easily have taken, repeatedly, because the assumption underneath the revenue did not survive contact with what the company says it is. Duolingo did not arrive at that owl by re-approving a document. Somebody looked at a quarter of results and said the polite version was not working, and then the company actually changed.
Here is the part that gets lost. Replanning is expensive. Six people, two weeks, a workshop, a deck. If you are going to spend that, spend it on the two or three decisions that are genuinely still open, and leave the rest of the plan alone. Confirming that you still believe your own strategy is a fine outcome. Pretending you re-examined it is not.
A plan that only adds is not a plan, it is a wish list with a budget attached.
July in Portland is the stretch where it stops raining and the whole city quietly reorganizes around being outside. Nobody writes that down. Everyone acts on it. I keep thinking that is the correct relationship between a plan and a document, and that we have it backwards most of the year.