Page 18 - Voices-2022.05

FROM THE DESK
What Does It Mean to Plan?
Jim Robison, DTM - Club Growth Director
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail ! —Benjamin Franklin
Planning is laying out your strategy for how to
reach your goal. Sometimes we do this without
even realizing it, and sometimes we must make
a deliberate effort to map out every step of the
journey. For example, if your goal is to have
food ready for dinner, you will likely plan out
what food you must have on hand, how to get
that food, and how to prepare that food. This
usually does not take a long planning process,
but it is planning, nonetheless. If your goal is to
have sufficient funds to retire on at the end of
your career, it probably requires a more intensive
level of planning, well in advance.
Our Toastmasters clubs have a mission to help
members improve their communication and
leadership skills. A score board that can help us
know whether our clubs are succeeding at that
mission, is the Distinguished Club Program. This
is not a competitive score board where clubs try
to do better than other clubs, but rather a joint
score board where ALL clubs can succeed.
Toastmasters asks every club to create a Club
Success Plan every year. What do these plans
entail? The Club Success Plan maps out the
strategy that the club can follow to achieve the
ten goals in the Distinguished Club Program.
How do you reach these goals? Some goals
can be achieved with little planning, just
because the club is doing what it should do to
18 ONE COMMUNITY
maintain club operations. Much like you might
not consider planning for dinner to be a major
undertaking (depending on the dinner) some of
the Distinguished Club Goals might not require
significant effort. The first step is to understand
what those goals are. The second step is to write
down how you will accomplish those goals.
Here is an approach that I like to use to plan
goals. I outline this approach as GOTA.
G oals
O bjectives
T asks
A ssignments
Goals—Toastmasters has a set of goals for
the clubs to meet. These are the ten goals that
make up the Distinguished Club Program.
Understanding the goals is the first step to
success. For the rest of this article, I will use one
specific goal to illustrate the process. Goal 1: Four
Level 1 awards achieved.
Objectives—To reach a goal, specific objectives
need to be reached. In our current example,
the first objective is to identify who in the Club
is positioned to achieve a Level 1 award. There
could, for example, be 4 objectives:
Jack will complete the final project for Level 1.
Jill will complete the final two speeches