Planning plays a vital role in making a business successful. It can predict the future challenges and the requirements which need to be fulfilled to achieve the final goal. And any good plan requires homework. Build a home without doing a soil test and you may find that the foundation is unstable.  Sun Tsu, author of The Art of War, points out that a successful military strategy stems from a solid understanding of the terrain, the enemy and your own relative strengths and weaknesses.

So the homework is necessary. But it’s not sufficient. If you want a plan to be as strong as possible—and if you want it to be successfully implemented—you need to involve a broad range of employees in the process. Customers need to have input, too. It is a powerful and efficient way to get customer input into planning, and it helps make plans more successful.

How different this is from the typical planning process! At many companies, senior management annually heads off to some offsite retreat, typically a pretty nice place. With the guide of a “planning facilitator,” the top people think great thoughts, often based on little homework and no employee or customer involvement. This Wizard of Oz approach provides lots of Dilbert comedy but rarely any successful plans.

Even more common is the lack of any ongoing planning process. Company leaders often explain that they are way too busy dealing with day-to-day problems to devote any time to planning. The problem with planning is that it does not provide an immediate payoff. It requires time and effort that could be spent on pressing day-to- day challenges. The phone is ringing and we have to answer it. A new order needs to get filled today. An employee mistake has to be remedied.

Companies need to do their homework to develop successful plans. And they need systematic input from employees, managers, and customers as well as from the financials. A coach may be able to facilitate the process. But there will be work you and your team need to do.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, if you do your homework and involve your people—and particularly if you do all that better than your competitors—your likelihood of success will soar.

Adapted from Bill Fotsch‘s blog Successful planning? Try homework—and involvement.