Congratulations! You’ve arrived in the C-suite by building your business or being promoted to the most senior leadership ranks of your firm. Your excitement and eagerness are palpable as you settle in to the work of leading your team to make your corner of the world, and the marketplace, better. But you may also have more than a few butterflies in your stomach, doubts in the back of your mind, or questions about what it will take to succeed in your new role. As leaders evolve and grow, transitions bring some of the most exciting, yet challenging circumstances that they are likely to face throughout their career. Aspiring leaders typically have vision for their organization, career, and impact that they want to have and draw on it as a source of motivation. It is the challenges, blind spots, and frustrations that tend to catch them by surprise. So today, we’re going to explore the question, what happens when the initial excitement of a new or evolving role or professional challenge moves from initial elation to “what have I gotten into?”

If failing to plan is planning to fail, then how do some leaders manage to succeed without the aid of a formal business plan? Business planning has a painful reputation. In fact, I regularly speak with leaders of successful organizations who tell me that it is among the most frustrating and painful challenges they have with some going so far as to avoid formal business plans entirely! Moreover, why do so many entrepreneurs’ lived experiences stand in opposition to conventional wisdom that planning must precede success, with effective planning for early-stage startups remaining largely a black box for practitioners and researchers alike? If success is predefined within the boundaries of business plans, why do we see global corporate juggernauts emerge such as Facebook and Google or regional firms develop such as the Texas grocery chain HEB that started as a small country store in 1905 and grew to become the state’s largest private employer? Clearly these organizations look nothing like the firms their founders envisioned in any business plan they wrote.