Action Plan Toolbox
Make your Actions Stick
This template is a collection of my favourite tools for action planning: SWOT-TOWS, Collusion of Mediocrity and proactive planning.
SWOT-TOWS
You are probably familiar with SWOT; in this template I have added TOWS, which is an elegant way to generate ideas and insights from a SWOT analysis by looking for ideas in the four bilateral combinations of the SWOT parameters:
Ideas to use Strengths to utilize Opportunities
Ideas to minimise Weaknesses towards Opportunities
Ideas to use Strengths to minimize Threats
Ideas to minimise Weaknesses towards Threats
Collusion of Mediocrity
This concept is developed by Paul Levy. The Collusion of Mediocrity has four levels:
Fake Niceness - comfort is sought at the expense of honesty and risk of discomfort.
False Revelation - we surface what is really going on, even at the risk of discomfort, and hope that doing this will be enough...
Diluting - we make incremental steps, taking a small jump rather than a large leap.
Reverting and Fading - we begin to make the change we need to make. However, there is no follow through and soon things revert back to their former state.
This template contains 5 questions designed to break collusion level 4 and increase the chance of real change.
Action Plan
Based on the concept of proactive planning, we provide a nice visual template to collect all your information about actions, end goal, milestones etc.
All of this is of course interconnected, hence it is very useful to have all tools in one place. Happy action planning :-)
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