Hello friends,

Greetings from Utrecht!

We're in the home stretch for the year. I'm slowly starting to round up my affairs for the year, and making sure I have everything I need for my yearly review.

This is also the time of year that I spend the most time in road-side hotels, helping clients with their annual planning.

So in that spirit, I'm sharing my full playbook for the perfect yearly planning session today, as well as linking to a personal annual review template that I really like.

This way, if you have any inclination to starting the year strong, both on a personal and a professional level, you'll have all the tools you need.

Today at a glance:

Essay - The Perfect Annual Meeting
The Ultimate [Personal] Annual Review
The best book Dan Shipper read last year
Open letter to The Game Awards to speak out on Palestine

A Step-By-Step Guide to the Perfect Annual Meeting

It's the end of the year, and that means management teams all over the world are gathering to plan for the year ahead.

Getting your yearly goals in focus is one of the most important things you can do to get off to a running start.

The trick is hitting the right balance between the strategic and the practical, the ambitious and the realistic.

I've developed a playbook for these meetings that helps companies nail that balance consistently, and I'm sharing it with you today.

It's a bit of a long read, because I wanted this to be as complete as possible, so that you can actually use this for your own meetings.

So without further ado, here's my full, step-by-step playbook for the perfect yearly planning session.

Overview

First off, let's get clear on the goals of a yearly planning session.

It's a moment for the management team to get together, reflect on the past year, take any learnings on board, and plan for the next year. You also want to get clear on the priorities for the next quarter so you can hit the ground running, and start making progress towards your goals.

I recommend all my clients to organize these sessions at an external location.

Far and away, the thing that gets in the way most at these sessions is when people are distracted. And nothing is more distracting than trying to think about the future of your company while your company's present is desperately trying to get your attention. The easiest way to take your team out of their day-to-day mindset is to take them out of their day-to-day environment.

The ideal length for these sessions is two days. Two days is long enough that you can spend real time on the issues that matter, but not so long that you get tempted to try and fix everything on the spot "because we're here anyway".

The first day is for looking back and reflecting. The second day is for looking ahead and defining concrete priorities.

Now, let's dive into the nitty gritty.

Agenda for Day 1

🥳 Celebrate wins (~30 mins; all times given are indicative)

Start the session by asking everyone to share 4 wins from the past year, and to express their expectations for the two-day session.

For the wins, I always ask my clients to name three professional wins, and 1 personal wins.

With everyone now in a positive mood, you move on to the review of the year.

✅ Review annual goals and financials (30 mins)

First, go through the plans you had defined at the start of the year.

Did you make your revenue and profit goals? Did you finish all of the goals you had set at the start of the year?

For anything that you didn't get done, have a brief discussion to get a shared understanding of the underlying reasons. Just remember that the goal is understanding, and not to assign blame.

Then, look back on the year as a whole. What have you learned as a group? What worked well? What didn't work?

This is a perfect time to share any comments, questions or confessions you might have with the rest of the team. Now is the time to learn from the past, and course-correct for the future.

✅ Review quarterly goals and financials (30 mins)

Next, review the past quarter.

Whether you're using Rocks, OKRs or some other way of prioritizing, tally what got done, and calculate the percentage. Remember, you're aiming for 80% done each quarter.

Discuss any learnings specific to the last quarter.

You might go back and forth between the review of the year and the quarter depending on what comes up, but that's fine. Just make sure you've gone through the goals you set, and discussed your learnings for each.

💪 Work on team health (60 mins)

All teams are made up of people, and making sure these people work together well is crucial if you want to reach the goals you set out.

So yes, working some form of team building into your session will be very beneficial to your chances of success. My only recommendation is that you make it an activity that directly addresses the level of trust and cooperation in the team.

I'm a big fan of the work of Patrick Lencioni and Brene Brown on this subject, and a good place to start is to do the One Thing exercise.

Going around the table, tell each team member their most admirable trait. Then, tell them one thing they should start or stop doing, for the greater good of the company. Whoever's turn it is, they can't talk until everyone has finished giving feedback, and then they can only ask clarifying questions.

After everyone has heard their positive and constructive feedback, each person picks one thing from the constructive feedback that they commit to working on in the coming year.

Check these every quarter on a better/same/worse scale, and aim to have everyone close the year on "better".

📈 Company performance snapshot (30 minutes)

At the start of any coaching project, I ask my clients to fill in a company performance assessment.

And every year, I ask them to redo the assessment, so they can see how far they've come, and to highlight potential areas of further improvement.

Here's a link to the assessment.

➕ SWOT analysis (60 minutes)

To get a broader sense of your company's playing field, it can be a good idea to fill in a SWOT analysis.

On a whiteboard, or a few big sheets of paper, have all team members write fill in the SWOT until no-one has anything left to add.

Now, here's where you turn this exercise into something with actual, practical value:

Go through each quadrant, and add anything that will be practically relevant to your company this year to your issue list.This list will come into play on the second day.

🔍 Review Company strategy (60 minutes)

No strategy should be static in the face of change. So go through all the elements of your strategy and see if they need to be updated.

If you follow my framework or anything similar, you'll have a one- or two-page document that contains everything relevant to your strategy. This is the time to go at it with everything you have.

If you don't have a document like this, I advise you to at the very least challenge the following elements of your company:

Your core values
Your company vision
Your company mission
Your core product or service
Your top level marketing strategy

📸 Create a 3-Year snapshot (60 minutes)

Every year, I have my clients create a fresh snapshot of what their business should look like in 3 years. It functions as a milestone in-between their long-term goals and their plans for the upcoming year.

The question to answer here is "what should our business look like in 3 years to be on track towards our long-term vision?".

To answer this, have all team members create their own version of this snapshot, looking at your SWOT, Issues List, vision statement and accountability or organization chart.

Include everything from team size to leadership team changes, to offices changes, to awards won, to portfolio changes... anything relevant to your journey.

Then, add everyone's lists together and review.

Go through each item and, based on whether that particular item is essential to have in place in 3 years, either Keep that item, Kill it or Combine it with another item (KKC).

Do this until your list contains between 5-15 items that the whole team can commit to.

After this, you'll probably all be ready for some R&R, so have a nice dinner and hang out as a team. Then, get some sleep so you're feeling fresh and ready for day 2!

INTERMEZZO

That was a lot of text already, and that was just the first day. Have a picture of the perfect dog, according to Midjourney:

/INTERMEZZO

Agenda for day 2

👀 Review day 1 (30 minutes)

To get back in the mood, have everyone share one business highlight from the previous day, and restate their expectations for the planning session.

Then, review the issue list you drafted from the SWOT, and the 3-Year Snapshot.

With everyone's head squarely back in the game, you then move on to setting your company's annual goals.

🎯 Set annual goals (120 minutes)

First, agree on the revenue and profit percentage targets for the year.

Now, have everyone list for themselves the 3-7 most important things that need to happen in the upcoming year to be on track to 3-year Snapshot.

When everyone is done, ask people to shout out the items on their list they think are no-brainers.

Complete the list, and Keep, Kill, Combine (KKC) until you have a list of 5-7 items long. The smaller your team, the smaller your list should be, potentially even dropping between 3-5 items.

Why so few?

Because keeping focus for a full year is really f*cking hard already, and giving people dozens of goals to prioritize according to their own taste is almost guaranteed to lead to problems.

Finally, put your list of annual goals next to your accountability or org chart and see if any changes are needed. Are all roles and responsibilities clear? Is it clear how each role contributes to the stated goals? Does everyone have enough time do do so? Do you need additional roles to make the goals? Are there any open roles that need to be filled? Is the whole company comprised of the Right People in the Right Seat (RPRS)? Is everyone still a good culture fit?

Go through your company scorecard or dashboard in the same way. Are you measuring the right things to keep you informed and accountable on the way to your stated goals?When you're happy with the plan, and everyone is ready to commit, you can move on to setting goals for the first quarter.

🎯 Set quarterly goals (60 minutes)

All of my clients work with quarterly priorities, or Rocks, to help keep them focused, aligned and accountable. You can read a previous post on Rocks here.

First, agree on the revenue and profit percentage.

Next, have everyone write down 3-7 priorities for the next 90 days. These should be things that are critical to being on track towards your annual goals.

Add all lists together and, you guessed it, KKC until you've whittled them down to 3-7 Rocks for the quarter. Again, the smaller the team, the narrower your focus should be.

Assign owners to each Rock. Owning a Rock means you are responsible for driving that Rock to completion, not that you'll be the one doing all the work it entails.

If people feel like they'll have time left in the quarter, they can define personal Rocks for themselves, usually from the priorities that didn't make the company Rock list.

Now you have a solid plan for the year, and a solid plan for the first quarter. But don't stop there.

❗️Issue solving (120+ minutes)

All of my clients use an issue list, which is quite simply a list of all the issues, challenges and opportunities that pop up in the company and are relevant to the leadership team. You can read a previous post on the issues list and issue solving here.

Often, these issues will be relevant to your quarterly Rocks, and it's good practice to work on those issues during the quarter (see my Perfect Weekly Meeting post)

But some things, like some of the items you'll have listed in your SWOT, are bigger than your quarterly priorities.

The perfect time to discuss those is in-between quarters, and at your annual planning session.

So first, clean up your Issues list. Anything covered by an item on either your year plan or plan for the quarter is taken off. They can came back on if and when they become active issues.

Then, start solving the issues that are left on the list.

Start by selecting 3 priority issues. Don't debate this too much, just select three that feel important.

Then, go through each in the following order: Identify the real, underlying issue; Discuss potential solutions; Solve the issue insofar as that's possible and commit to follow-up steps (IDS).

When you've discussed your 3 issues, pick 3 more. Rinse and repeat until the day is over, or everyone is tired.

Then, move on to wrapping up your session.

🎁 Wrap up (20 minutes)

First, clean up your issue list. Anything that has been solved can be removed. Then, split the issues that are left between issues relevant to the quarter (you'll want to discuss these on a weekly basis), and issues not relevant to the quarter (you'll revisit these in the next quarterly meeting).

Finally, conclude the meeting.

Going around the table, have everyone share 1) their thoughts and feelings regarding the session, 2) whether their expectations have been met, 3) their One Thing if you did the exercise, and 4) a 1-10 rating for the meeting.

And that's it. Two days of reflecting, planning and problem solving, resulting in clear goals for the year and the first quarter, so you can get off to a flying start.

I hope this playbook will help you have more effective annual planning sessions. If you're using a different format, let me know what I'm missing!

The Best Bits

The Ultimate Annual Review: If you want to get started on your own annual review, this is an excellent starting point. Steve Schlafman has put together a list of topics and questions that will help you get "a holistic perspective on where you've been and where you want to go".

The best book Dan Shipper read last year: I stumbled across this post on Twitter, and immediately added the book to my own reading list. Shipper explains that this is the rare meditation book that combines very practical instructions with deeper insights and knowledge on meditation and Buddhism. If you're at all interested in this domain, at least check out Shipper's essay on the book.

Open Letter to the Game Awards: The Game Awards Future Class has written an open letter to Geoff Keighley and the Game Awards, urging them to use the awards to break our industry's silence on the Palestinian genocide. Anyone can sign, and there is still time to do so, if you feel so inclined.

See you in two weeks!

Martijn