Business and management literature bulges with publications promising to help us with business plans in a week, three days and even 24 hours. Their recommended formats for the business plan are, by and large, fairly similar. Although the terminology will vary slightly from author to author, they all suggest we produce an executive summary, a mission statement, an analysis of market segments, profit and loss and cash flow forecasts, and so on. Such a degree of concurrence is to some extent reassuring – if all the available guidance is in agreement, it must be reliable mustn’t it?

Without wishing to decry any of these publications, we would advise a degree of healthy scepticism when deciding what should go into your business plan. Scepticism, not about their advice, but about the familiar elements they recommend that a business plan should cover. We would suggest an approach which questions each element. For instance, does your organisation really need a mission statement? It’s a bald question, which should perhaps be broken down further:

The second question is an important one because, as many organisation that have implemented quality programmes will testify, the process is often more valuable than the result. It is quite feasible that the exchange of ideas sparked by a discussion about the mission statement, or any other element of the business plan, will be more valuable to the organisation than the statement itself.