There is a moment in every quarterly planning meeting where you can tell whether real planning is happening or whether everyone is performing it. The moment usually arrives somewhere in the first thirty minutes, when the founder presents the goals for the coming quarter. If the senior team listens with mild interest, nodding at appropriate moments, and the conversation moves quickly toward how the goals will be operationalised, the goals are theatre. If the senior team contests the goals, surfaces concerns the founder had not considered, proposes revisions that the founder finds uncomfortable, and the conversation extends past the scheduled time, the planning is real.
Most quarterly planning meetings are theatre. The goals are the predictable continuation of last quarter’s work, dressed up in the costume of strategic planning, presented as if they were freshly chosen, and absorbed by a team that already knew what they would be. The performance has its own value, in that it produces a document that can be referenced later and a sense of alignment that the team can carry into the work. The performance is not, however, planning. It is the ritual that has replaced planning in most ventures, and the substitution is one of the more underappreciated reasons that ventures fail to break out of incremental trajectories into genuinely new ones.
I want to argue in this piece that the test for whether your quarterly planning is real or performative is straightforward, that most founders avoid the test because the answer is uncomfortable, and that the discipline of running it is one of the smallest and highest-leverage interventions available to you.
The diagnostic
The test is one question. Before you announce next quarter’s goals, ask three of your senior team members, separately, to write down what they think the goals will be. If their predictions match what you were planning to announce, your goals are not goals. They are the document that records what everyone already expected to happen.
Real goals are surprising. Not because they are arbitrary, but because they reflect a deliberate choice about what the venture should pursue that is not the obvious continuation of current activity. A team that can predict the goals has been correctly reading the venture’s current trajectory; they have not been participating in a planning process, because no planning has been happening. The trajectory continues, the team executes, the goals describe the continuation, and nothing in the venture’s direction has been chosen by anyone in the meeting that pretended to be choosing it.
This is the structural reason quarterly planning is so often theatre. The default behaviour of any operating venture is to continue what it is doing. The team is calibrated to that continuation. The financial projections assume it. The customer commitments depend on it. The path of least resistance, when planning, is to formalise the continuation as the goal, which produces a document everyone can agree to because it asks no one to do anything different. The agreement is the visible output. The absence of choice is the invisible cost.
Why the theatre persists
There are three structural reasons quarterly planning theatre persists despite founders intellectually recognising the problem.
The first is that real goals require a contested conversation, and contested conversations are operationally expensive. A goal that surprises the team will be argued with. The argument will surface concerns about feasibility, resources, sequencing, and trade-offs. The argument will reveal disagreements that were quietly held but never expressed. The argument will require the founder to either revise the goal in response to the legitimate concerns or hold the goal despite them. Each of these is uncomfortable, and the discomfort produces the founder’s instinct to skip the contested conversation in favour of the predictable goals that no one will argue with.
The second is that real goals require accepting that some quarterly outcomes will fall short, and shortfalls are politically expensive. A goal that genuinely stretches the team will be hit some quarters and missed in others. The miss has consequences: investor concern, board questioning, team morale impact, and the founder’s own discomfort with apparent failure. The predictable goals, by contrast, are nearly always hit, because they describe what the team was already going to do. The hit looks like execution; it is actually the absence of stretch. The founders who choose theatre over real goals are choosing the political cost of occasional shortfall against the political cost of occasional miss, and the calculation rewards theatre across most political environments.
The third is that real goals require the founder to have actually thought about what the venture should pursue, and that thinking is the work that founders most consistently defer. The work involves examining the current trajectory critically, identifying which dimensions of the venture are underperforming relative to what is possible, deciding which of those dimensions to address this quarter rather than next, and committing to the resource allocation the choice implies. None of this work is glamorous, and none of it produces output that anyone outside the founder’s head can see until the goals are announced. The temptation is to skip the work and produce the goals from the obvious trajectory, and the temptation is acted on quietly more often than founders admit.
These three reasons combine to produce the systematic substitution of theatre for planning. The founders intellectually know the difference. The structural pressures push them toward theatre anyway, quarter after quarter, until the venture’s trajectory has been determined by accumulated continuation rather than by any deliberate choice the founder made.
What real planning produces
The alternative is not dramatic. It is the same quarterly meeting, with one structural addition: the founder’s predictability test, run against the senior team, before the goals are finalised. If the team’s predictions match what the founder was planning to announce, the founder revises the goals. The revision is the planning.
The revision usually involves identifying a dimension of the venture that the obvious trajectory does not address, and making that dimension a goal. The dimension might be a customer segment that has been growing but has not been deliberately invested in. A capability the team has been developing informally that should be formalised. A market the venture has been observing but not entering. A pricing position the venture has been maintaining but not raising. Each of these is a real choice, and each will produce some discomfort when announced, because the team will have to do something other than the predictable continuation.
A quarter run on real goals looks different from a quarter run on theatre. The team is actually planning rather than executing-plus-reporting. The senior team members are contributing to the strategic direction rather than receiving it. The disagreements that surface are productive because they are about real trade-offs rather than about how to express the predictable in slightly different language. The work of the quarter is occasionally surprising rather than uniformly familiar.
By year-end, the venture that has run real goals across four quarters has changed in ways the venture running theatre has not. Some changes will be improvements; some will be lessons; some will reveal that the founder’s strategic intuition was wrong and the team’s quiet confidence in the trajectory was correct. All of these are useful. The theatre venture, by contrast, has continued. The continuation may have produced reasonable results, but the venture has not chosen anything; it has merely persisted.
The closing observation
If you suspect your quarterly planning has drifted into theatre, the most useful thing to do this week is to run the test before next quarter’s planning meeting. Ask three senior team members, separately, to write down what they think the goals will be. Read what they wrote.
If their predictions match what you were planning to announce, you have a small window in which to do the actual planning that the meeting will otherwise substitute for. Use the window. Identify the dimension that the predictable goals do not address. Make that dimension a goal. Bring the goal into the meeting and accept that the conversation will be longer and more uncomfortable than the theatre version would have been.
The discomfort is the diagnostic. Real planning is uncomfortable because real choices have costs the team has to absorb. Theatre is comfortable because no choices are being made. A founder whose quarterly meetings are consistently comfortable is a founder whose venture is being run by the trajectory rather than by the founder, and the trajectory does not produce the genuinely new outcomes that distinguish ventures that compound from ventures that merely persist.
Plan for real. The theatre is well-rehearsed and produces no surprises. The substance is what produces the venture you actually wanted to build.
For the related discipline of choosing specific outcomes rather than vague ambitions, see Stop Thinking Big. For the input metrics that distinguish real progress from continuation, see Sales Targets Are Output Metrics. For the broader assumption-audit discipline that surfaces the dimensions theatre conceals, see The Quarterly Assumption Audit.
