In my last piece, I wrote about the missing keystone in change projects: the coordination layer that so often determines whether a programme moves or quietly drifts. Today I want to go one step further back, to the moment before any of that coordination begins.
Because in many cases, the real problem starts even earlier.
The pull towards doing
There is a particular kind of pressure that exists in smaller businesses. It is the pressure to be seen to be moving.
When a decision gets made, a new system, a process change, a restructure, the instinct is to start immediately. To assign tasks, hold a kick-off, begin. Planning can feel like a delay. A luxury. Something larger organisations do because they have the time and the people, but not something a growing business needs to spend weeks on.
I understand that instinct. In fast-moving businesses, momentum matters, and stopping to plan can feel like losing it.
But in my experience, both in large-scale corporate programmes and in the work I do with growing businesses across Yorkshire, skipping the planning phase does not save time. It borrows it, at a very high rate of interest.
What planning actually means
When I was working in Sales and Operations Planning at Morrisons, the entire discipline was built around one idea: before you commit to doing something, you need to understand what it will actually require.
Not in theory. In practice.
What are the resource implications? What does it cost, fully, not optimistically? Who is affected, and how? What has to stop, or slow down, in order for this to happen? What does success actually look like, and how will you know when you have reached it?
These are not complicated questions. But they are uncomfortable ones, because answering them honestly sometimes means adjusting the scope, the timeline, or the ambition of a project before it has even begun.
In large organisations, there are people whose job it is to ask these questions. Project managers, finance business partners, operational planners. They slow things down deliberately, because they know what happens when those questions do not get asked.
In most growing businesses, nobody has that role. And so the questions do not get asked, or they get answered quickly and optimistically, in a meeting where everyone is already committed to the idea.
The compounding cost of under-planning
The consequences show up later, and they compound.
A project scoped without proper resource planning runs out of capacity halfway through. A budget set without understanding the full cost of change gets exceeded before the hard work has even started. A timeline built without accounting for business-as-usual pressures slips, then slips again, until the original deadline becomes a source of embarrassment rather than a milestone.
And because the planning was not done at the start, each of these problems has to be solved in real time, under pressure, by people who are already stretched.
The project that was supposed to reduce the load on the leadership team ends up adding to it.
Why this happens more in smaller businesses
It would be easy to frame this as a discipline problem, as though business owners simply need to slow down and think more carefully. But that is not quite right.
The real driver is structural. In smaller businesses, fewer people are involved in any given decision, and roles are often less clearly defined. There is no one whose specific job is to challenge the plan before it becomes a commitment. The person who had the idea is often also the person leading the project, which makes it psychologically difficult to pump the brakes.
There is also a resource tension that is different from the corporate environment. In a large organisation, a planning phase has dedicated time and people attached to it. In a growing business, planning competes directly with the day-to-day work of running the business. It rarely wins that competition.
So projects begin underprepared, not through carelessness, but through a combination of pressure, structure, and the very real demands of keeping everything else moving at the same time.
What good planning looks like in a growing business
The answer is not to import a corporate planning process wholesale. That would be its own kind of mistake: too slow, too formal, and disconnected from the pace at which smaller businesses actually operate.
But there is a middle ground. A planning phase that is proportionate, practical, and focused on the questions that genuinely matter before work begins.
At minimum, that means being clear on scope: what is in this project, and what is deliberately out of it. It means understanding the resource picture honestly, who is doing what, alongside what else, and whether that is actually feasible. It means having a realistic view of cost that accounts for the indirect and hidden implications of change, not just the headline numbers. And it means agreeing what done looks like before anyone starts moving.
None of that requires a planning department. But it does require someone to hold the space for those conversations, and to keep holding it when the urge to just get on with it becomes hard to resist.
The value of an outside perspective
One of the things I find most useful when working with clients on change projects is simply being the person who asks the uncomfortable questions at the start.
Not to slow things down for the sake of it. But because I have seen enough projects, both at scale and in smaller businesses, to know which questions, left unanswered, tend to cause the most damage later.
An external perspective also helps with a problem that is surprisingly common in owner-led businesses: the difficulty of challenging your own assumptions when you are also the person most invested in the outcome.
Good planning is not pessimism. It is the work that makes everything that follows more likely to succeed.
Before the doing, the thinking
The urge to do is understandable. In growing businesses especially, action feels like progress, and planning can feel like its opposite.
But the projects I have seen succeed, at every scale and in every sector, share a common characteristic. Someone, at the beginning, made the time to ask the hard questions. To understand what the project would actually require. To make the plan before making the commitment.
That step does not guarantee success. But skipping it makes failure significantly more likely.
And the cost of going back to do the planning that was not done at the start, once a project is already in motion, already over budget, already behind, is always higher than doing it properly in the first place.
If you are approaching a change project and want to make sure the planning is solid before work begins, I am always happy to have that conversation.
Get Ahead’s team can support the full planning phase, from scoping and resource planning to cost modelling and stakeholder mapping, as well as the delivery that follows.
Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com | Explore our support: getaheadva.com