A plan, in business, is a short-term bridge between how things look today and how they should look, and it's built from the resources you already have. It starts to move only when someone settles who does what, when, and how.
What a plan is, according to the source
A plan is a broad, short-term intention. It takes what already exists in the business and uses it to move today's situation toward the one you want to see. In the booklet's language, today's situation is the existing scene and the wanted one is the ideal scene.
Three things in that definition surprise people.
The first is the time frame. A plan is short-term, and five years is out of scope.
The second is the resources. A plan rests on the resources you have today. The ones you'd like to have don't count.
The third is the shape. A plan is a bridge between two scenes, so writing one requires knowing both where you stand and where you're going. A wish list is a different thing.
Those three explain why a lot of what businesses call a plan doesn't work like one. It has no gap in it, or it leans on resources that don't exist yet, or it stretches over years.
Suppose a business where a quote goes out somewhere between two days and a week, and the ideal scene is a quote within an hour. The plan could be to prepare three ready-made templates for the common job types. The gap is clear, and the plan uses something that already exists.
The opposite is a sentence like our plan is to grow. It has no gap, no resource, and no moment when you could say it was completed.
An approved plan still doesn't happen
According to the booklet, no mistake in this chapter stops more businesses. The source says it directly: plans are not targets.
You can draw up a plan and approve it, and nothing in that guarantees it will be carried out. You can plan to make a million, and unless the when, the how and the who are set as targets, it won't happen. The plan is the design. Targets are what turn it into something that occurs.
Suppose a restaurant owner has spent two years planning a second site. Drawings exist, and so do price quotes. Nobody is responsible, there is no date, and there is no answer to how the staff would be hired. Nothing moves.
Now suppose the same owner adds three targets, each with a name and a date attached. More steps get taken within a month than in the previous two years. The drawings are the same drawings, and the plan itself hasn't changed. What it gained is targets.
Check before you build
There's another kind of failure, and it's expensive because it shows up after the money is spent. The source gives an example that's hard to forget: a Greek theater in Corfu, built halfway and abandoned. Nobody had run a survey beforehand to establish that anyone wanted it.
A plan that wasn't preceded by a check of what people want and need can stay half-finished forever.
Suppose a shoe shop puts $12,000 into refitting a children's section, when most of its customers are couples without children. The section stands empty. That's Corfu, in a smaller size.
On the other side, suppose a graphic designer who, before building a new service, sends ten messages in business groups and asks. She builds only after the demand is confirmed.
The booklet gives this check a name of its own, and it's one of the six kinds of target in the next chapter. The principle itself is simple: you check before you build.
You have a plan even if you never wrote it
The last remark in the chapter is useful for anyone who works alone. According to the source, a plan has to exist in a person's mind, written down or not, before a program, the sequence of targets that carries it out, can be written from it.
In other words, you have a plan. Always. What you don't know is whether it's on paper or only in your head.
In a small business that matters more than in a large one. While you work alone, a plan in your head holds up. The problem shows on the day a second person joins, and it turns out there's no way to hand it over.
Suppose a shop owner hires her first employee and finds she has nothing to hand over. Everything lived in her head, and none of it had ever been put into words. In the other direction, an installer puts the plan from his head onto a single page before taking on an apprentice. Both of them save a month.
Writing has another job even when nobody is there to receive it: it shows you where the plan is still incomplete.
What the booklet has on this
In the booklet From Goal to Target, this chapter ends with two exercises, build it and analyse. The chapter after it moves to the six kinds of target, the part that turns a plan into something somebody does.
A plan is a bridge. For anyone to cross it, someone has to settle who, when and how.