Planning Leader — The Guardian of the Vision
Leads: Align | Event: Summit
The Planning Leader ensures that all transformation efforts remain aligned with the organization's long-term vision. They are the custodian of strategic coherence — the person who asks, "Does this still serve where we are going?"
Key Responsibilities
- Facilitate the Summit with Team Owners
- Review objectives and transformation initiatives across the organization
- Adjust the innovation portfolio when the strategic landscape shifts
- Define upper-level objectives that cascade into Planning cycles
The Tension
The Planning Leader must balance ambition with reality. They see the full portfolio of transformation initiatives and must decide which ones to continue, pause, or kill — knowing that every decision affects teams that are already in motion.
Anti-pattern: The Ivory Tower
The Planning Leader defines upper-level objectives without incorporating results from Reviews. The Summit becomes a top-down broadcast where the portfolio is adjusted based on executive intuition rather than on evidence from the teams. The feedback loop from T1.3 → S1.1 is broken.
How to detect: Upper-level objectives change between cycles without reference to team results. Team Owners attend the Summit but are not asked to present their Reviews. The innovation portfolio reflects market trends but ignores internal learning.
How to recover: The Summit must start with team-level evidence, not end with it. The Planning Leader must require every Team Owner to bring their Review outputs — results per objective, gaps identified, improvement opportunities. Only then can portfolio adjustments be grounded in reality.
PDCA Participation
| Step | PDCA | Event | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| S1.1 | Check | Summit | Reviews objectives and transformation initiatives across the organization |
| S1.2 | Act | Summit | Adjusts the innovation portfolio and defines upper-level objectives for the next cycle |