Build backward from a stated destination

Planning forward from where you are produces initiatives: sensible things, each individually defensible, collectively unranked. Planning backward from where you said you are going produces a route, and a route has the useful property that you can tell when you are off it.

The method is mechanical. Start at the destination sentence. Ask what must be true immediately before it, then what must be true before that, and keep going until you reach something that is true today. What you have when you stop is the shortest chain of conditions between here and there.

Two things fall out of this immediately and both are worth more than the plan itself.

The first is that some current initiatives do not appear anywhere on the chain. They are not bad work. They are work that does not move the stated destination, which means either the destination is wrong or the work is, and it is worth being explicit about which.

The second is that the chain usually contains one or two conditions nobody owns. These are the interesting ones. A condition that must be true, that nothing currently makes true, is the clearest possible statement of where the operation will stall, and you found it before it stalled.