December and January are generally quiet months for consultancy types like me. I’m quite happy with that. I get to spend time with my two girls while they’re still young enough to want to hang out with me. I also tend to read a lot of books, and we’ve been going camping over the Australia Day long weekend with the same group of 40 friends for the last 11 years.

Invariably, somewhere around mid-January, my brain develops an itch, and I turn my mind to what I want to create for the new year. I reflect on the work I’ve done with clients over the past 12 months – the problems I’ve helped them work through and the new ones that have emerged. I then spend the next six weeks developing content and crafting a new keynote to help address the challenges they’re facing.

But this year was different

Instead of developing something new, I spent time looking back through 15 years of content, including 10 years of keynotes, to see how it all fits together. To be honest, I didn’t really expect it to make sense – but ultimately, it did. And in doing so, it helped me reconnect with both what I do and why I do it.

This reflection has resulted in two things. First, an entirely revamped and updated services guide. My team have been working on it for the last few weeks, and it’s now available for download from my website (kudos to Sarah and Jun for their work, it looks amazing). Second, it’s given me a powerful and elegant way of describing what I actually do (Mum and Dad, I know you still struggle with this, so hopefully the following helps).

The planning pyramid

A lot of the clients I work with are undertaking some form of strategic planning – the end result of which is an agreed plan on how to best use their organisation’s resources to achieve an outcome they’re collectively committed to. Sounds simple, right? But it’s much harder to do.

Before you have a plan you need to be able to agree on the best options……but to identify the best options you need to agree on how to prioritise them….
…and to prioritise them, you need to know what your options are…
…and to know what your options are you first need to agree on what you’re collectively trying to achieve…
…and to do that, you need a shared understanding of what’s going on, what might happen next, and – within that context – what you really care about.

This could probably be presented more elegantly, like this…

Do we really need to do all that?

I appreciate that doing all of the above can be time-consuming and resource intensive. So, many organisations choose not to. They get a small group to create the plan on behalf of everyone… or even better, they outsource it to a Big Four type consulting firm. The problem? Unless every step has been properly addressed, you’ll end up facing questions like: ‘What do you mean?’, ‘Why are we doing this?’, ‘What else could we do?’, ‘Is this really the best way? and ‘What am I supposed to be doing?’

Over the next couple of weeks we’re going to dive deeper into each of these layers, starting at the foundation: Shared Understanding. But for now – in case you were too absorbed in the content to click the download link –  take a moment to be awed by the incredible work that Sarah and Jun have put into my 2025 Services Guide.

Simon