If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!
— Benjamin Franklin
Once you have verified that you have a viable solution, you can plot the path that takes you to your goal. In Step 6 of Enneagram Change Management you develop the plan that solves the problem. You optimize the path considering all important metrics — time, cost, quality, resource availability, etc. You anticipate risks and work to minimize and mitigate them. In Step 6 you are looking into the future, into your crystal ball, envisioning the successful solution to the problem and all the steps that will get you there.
Excerpt from Teamwork 9.0
Enneagram Type 6 is at the core of the Head-Thinking-Anxiety center; as such, 6s will actively pursue minimizing their anxiety. Uncertainty and risk increase anxiety the most for Type 6s. Therefore, they naturally prepare for the future by planning ahead and seeking to minimize risk.
Type 6s can look at a number of scenarios and, using their anxiety level as a guide, instinctively spot the one with the fewest unknowns, the fewest pitfalls, and the highest likelihood of success. Using the pro/con analysis generated in Step 5, the 6 can assess each scenario and plot a path into the future to foresee likely outcomes. They can predict which ideas have the clearest path to the goal, because those ideas cause the 6 the least amount of anxiety. This Type 6 dynamic comes into play in Step 6 of problem solving.
The Path of Least Danger
Having worked through the logical analysis of Step 5, the team will have reached a general consensus as to which ideas are the most viable and favorable for getting to the goal. This is the indication that your team has naturally arrived at Step 6, the Planning step. You can treat these favorable ideas as the framework for your solution—the skeleton, as it were. Now it is time to add the meat.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!
In this step, the meat includes all the details associated with associated with following the plan to achieve the goal. What resources are needed? How much do those resources cost? Who needs to be involved, and when? What is the schedule for implementation? All these details need to be mapped out for presentation to the stakeholders responsible for allocating those resources. Enlisting the help of a team member with project management skills makes sense at this point in the process. It is exactly this skill set that comes into play in Step 6.
Plan A/Plan B
At this point, you still may have a couple of viable paths to get to the goal. You may want to split your problem-solving team into smaller groups of advocates for each viable idea and let each group build a plan. As the details are fleshed out, you will see which idea has the shorter schedule, which has the lower cost, which requires the fewest people, and which has the fewest uncertainties and risks. With that knowledge, the team can develop a Plan A and a backup Plan B.
In Step 6, you will have decided the one or two ideas or sets of ideas that get you to the goal and solve the problem. You will have put together a detailed plan to implement the ideas. The team is now prepared to present the plan to the stakeholders and sponsors, especially those who can allocate the resources necessary to make the plan come true. Now is the time to promote the plan!
Does your team take the time to plan the path to your goal? Do you anticipate and mitigate risks? Do you have a fallback plan, a Plan B?
[Video Transcript]
Step 6 is where your team takes the most promising idea and builds a project plan that gets you all the way to the goal. Who does what and when? Type 6 is often called the questioner. Their brain is constantly asking questions. What if this happens? What if that happens? They’re constantly on the lookout for pitfalls and developing strategies to avoid them. In Step 6 of problem solving, you’ll want the team to build a low-risk plan that gets it to the goal. The plan can include risk mitigation strategies and contingency plans.
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