The Line Missing From Your 2027 Plan

A typical annual plan covers the goals for the year, the financial targets, and the budget to support them. Budget usually drives the process, and that’s appropriate. Without a healthy business, there isn’t much of a future to plan for.

What annual plans rarely cover in the same detail is the people expected to carry them out, understanding whether they have the skills the goals require, and what it will take to get them there.

What’s Different About Planning This Year

The basic exercise hasn’t changed much. Leadership teams still choose a direction, set goals that would make the year a success, and decide what to fund.

What has changed is the context and environment around the planning exercise.

Strategic horizons have gotten shorter, and fewer organizations are building five-year plans the way they once did. Many teams are smaller, and the people on them are already carrying more. Roles are shifting as technology takes on more of the work, which means the skills that made someone effective last year may not be the ones next year’s plan relies on.

There is also a growing expectation of “more and better” across many organizations. Leaders are being asked to deliver more, often with fewer people, and in many cases no one has defined what better looks like or how it will be measured.

So while choosing the destination may look the same as it always has, getting there looks different. Who does the work and how it gets done has changed for many organizations.

Two Plans, Not One

A complete plan for next year has two parts.

The first is the business plan. These are the goals for the year, the financial targets, and the initiatives that will get the organization there.

The second is the people plan that makes the business plan possible. That isn’t the work itself, it’s the plan for bringing the team to the point where they’re capable of doing the work. It covers the skills they’ll need, the development that will get them there, and the support leaders will need along the way.

It can help to think of them as 1A and 1B. They aren’t a first priority and a second one. They’re two halves of the same priority, and both need to be in place before the year begins.

In practice, most organizations spend nearly all of their planning time on the business plan. The people plan tends to show up later, if at all, usually as a training line that may be cut when the budget gets tight.

An annual plan isn’t finished until the people plan has a framework behind it and resources to support it.

What Happens When the People Plan Is Missing

Business goals can sometimes be achieved without a people plan. 

However, the cost shows up somewhere else: in the strong performers who absorb the gap, in leaders stretched across skills their teams haven’t had the chance to build, and in a team that starts the following year with less capacity.

That gap between what a plan asks of people and what they’re ready to do has always existed. Today the implications are felt more deeply, because there are fewer people to share the load.

“We Can’t Add One More Thing”

The most common objection to investing in development right now is a fair one. People are already stretched, and making time for their own growth can feel like one more thing on a full plate. Even the most committed leaders get pulled toward whatever is most urgent.

But the case for development is strongest exactly when people are taking on more. When the work is changing and the team is smaller, the time spent building capability is what makes the rest of the plan manageable. The alternative is asking people to deliver a new kind of work with the same skills and less support, and hoping it holds.

Where Organizations Can Start

• Keep the number of big goals small. When an organization has a dozen major initiatives, it often struggles to make real progress on any of them. Three is a good starting point, and the harder part is holding to it.
• Break each goal into quarterly and monthly pieces, and be disciplined about not letting new priorities slip in underneath.
• For each goal, name who will carry it and what they’ll need to be able to do that they can’t do yet.
• Start with your strongest performers. For each one, consider their goals for next year, where the gaps are, and how to close them, whether that’s coaching, a leadership program, a project, or a stretch role.
• Put dollars against the people plan now, in this planning cycle, rather than waiting for the gap to show up in March.

Where This Lands

The goals in most 2027 plans will be ambitious and the organizations most likely to reach them are the ones that plan for the people who have to deliver them with the same care they give the targets.

That’s the line we’d encourage every leadership team to add before the plan is final.

AJO partners with organizations on leadership development, coaching, HR consulting, and career transition, including helping leadership teams plan for the year ahead and supporting the leaders who will carry that plan forward.