Continuous Planning
Traditional organizations perform planning on a schedule. This schedule mindset has even permeated purportedly frameworks like Scrum and SAFe. But schedule-based planning has many disadvantages, and in fact the most successful companies rely more on continuous and event-based planning.
In a continuous approach, people are always working to refine plans. For example, a product manager might always be considering new uses for the product, new features, and new markets. Instead of a scheduled planning session, they are always refining their list of actions to take to advance on these issues.
In a continuous approach, meetings are set up when people feel it would be beneficial: either they want to brainstorm, or they have had a chance to think through recent events or outcomes. Instead of saying “let’s meet every month”, they say “let’s meet the next time it will be beneficial”, and they stay on top of the issues. tracking trailing and leading metrics, and reflecting on events and outcomes as they occur.
When planning continuously, it is important to rely mostly on written communication for sharing information. Meetings are best reserved for discussion. Otherwise, people would be meeting almost continuously.