The process of accomplishing goals often follows this pattern. It is a five-pronged approach that many people do not follow but almost always this approach guarantees accomplishment. Here they are:
1. Ideation:
This is the process of formation of ideas. While some ideas can hit your mind when you are busy with unrelated things, some ideas come during an active process of generating ideas. For instance, during a brainstorming session or keen observation of events. Carefully put down the ideas on paper. Writing sediments the ideas, brings clarity and sometimes even helps you to generate more ideas.
2. Planning:
Planning is the process of devising activities that would help you accomplish your ideas. During planning, you want to know to whom those ideas are best targeted, whether it is a futuristic idea or something present, the budget for it, and defining roles and responsibilities. In planning, you’re majoring in the questions of who and when.
3. Strategy:
What are the best methods to bring to reality these plans? Here you are answering the question, “How?” So, in strategy, you want to look at the best timing, location, instruments, and visual or audio methods. Strategy is often based on what has worked, is working or is most probable to work. In the process of strategizing, your plans are refined.
4. Execution:
Act on those ideas. Execution is the ultimate goal. An idea acted upon is worth more than 5 ideas on paper. And five ideas on paper are worth more than fifty ideas in your head. No one gets rewarded for having several ideas in the mind. A few are rewarded for sharing their ideas or writing them down. But everyone is rewarded in some measure when he acts on his ideas. The first reward is to yourself – you respected yourself so much that you acted on your ideas. That is fulfilling. Execute your ideas.
5. Evaluation:
Many people are happy to execute an idea and stop there. While execution brings fulfilment, what guarantees continued success is to have a system where your accomplishments are evaluated against a set of parameters. These parameters were possibly set up during the planning stage and fine-tuned at the time of strategizing. When done well, you can see if you hit your target and what percentage success rate. With the feedback from the evaluation process, you can adjust your plans and strategies if and where necessary.
