Q4 has a habit of arriving faster than anyone expects. By the time October starts, the hours you’d hoped to spend planning have vanished into delivery.
So plan in September. Ninety minutes is enough, if you’re disciplined about it.
Why 90 days, not 12 months
The pace of change in AI has changed how we think about planning. One idea keeps coming up in our conversations: “The AI strategy is a 90-day strategy. Competitive advantage lasts only 12 weeks, then everyone catches up.” Another way of saying it: tactics will change, principles will remain.
You don’t need a 40-page plan. You need a clear next 90 days, and the discipline to review it at the end.
The agenda
Minutes 0-15: Look back (honestly). What worked, what didn’t, and what took far more effort than the result justified? Don’t defend anything. Just list it.
Minutes 15-30: Stop before you start. Before adding new automation, ask what work should simply stop. One line we hear often is that “the first step has to be stopping the unnecessary work before you add automation.” Automating a pointless process just makes the pointless process faster.
Minutes 30-50: Find the bottlenecks. Where does work queue up? Where does it wait for one person? Where are people re-entering data that already exists elsewhere?
Minutes 50-70: Choose three outcomes. Not tasks. Outcomes. “Cut proposal time from six hours to one” is an outcome. “Try a new proposal tool” is a task. Limit yourself to three, because focus is what makes this work.
Minutes 70-85: Assign owners and dates. Every outcome gets a name and a date. If it doesn’t, it’s a wish.
Minutes 85-90: Decide what you’ll review, and when. Book the 90-day review now, before the diary fills.
The mistake most teams make
They treat planning as a one-off event. A useful line from a recent talk sums it up: good habits beat one-off projects. The 90 minutes matters less than the review you schedule after it.
One optional extra
If you run a team, take 10 minutes to check who’s blocked when someone’s on holiday or off sick. A single point of failure is much cheaper to fix in September than in November.
Want a second pair of eyes on your Q4 outcomes? Book a call and bring your list.
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