The Diagnostic Most Businesses Skip Before Setting Next Year's Plan

Most businesses set next year's plan the same way, whether or not they'd admit it: leadership gets in a room, talks through what felt hard this year, and allocates next year's budget against a mix of instinct, memory and whoever argued their case most persuasively. It's not a bad process. It's just an incomplete one, because it leaves out the people actually doing the work.

Over the past few months, we've run a pulse diagnostic with a number of clients specifically to fill that gap before their 2027 planning locks in. The pattern that comes up most often isn't dramatic. It's a mismatch between what leadership assumes the problem is and what the data actually shows.

A business convinced its retention issue is about pay usually finds, once people are asked directly and given room to answer honestly, that the real driver is something closer to clarity — not understanding how decisions get made, not knowing where they stand, not seeing a path even if one exists. A business that assumes its biggest gap is a particular skill set often finds the sharper issue is that its strongest people don't feel like anyone's tracking their development at all, skill gaps aside.

None of this shows up from a leadership team's own read of the business, however experienced that leadership team is. It shows up from asking, properly, and building in enough anonymity and follow-up that people actually say what they mean rather than what's comfortable to say in front of their manager.

The value of doing this before a plan is set, rather than after, is straightforward. Money and attention are finite going into any new year. Spent against an assumption, they land wherever the assumption pointed — which might be right, but is just as likely to miss the actual issue. Spent against evidence, they land on the thing most likely to have a real impact, whether that's leadership capability, structural clarity, communication, or something else entirely that wouldn't have made the shortlist without the data.

There's a practical window for this too. A diagnostic run in October or early November leaves enough time to fold the findings into a 2027 plan that's still being finalised. Run the same exercise in February, and the business isn't planning anymore — it's explaining why the plan already made isn't quite working, and adjusting a budget that's already been signed off.

If your business is setting next year's priorities over the coming weeks, the honest question is whether that plan is built on what leadership assumes is true, or on what the people in the business have actually said. The two aren't always the same thing, and the businesses that check tend to build a better plan than the ones that don't.