One of the simplest, snappiest and most useful planning tools I know is one we teach at Rockwood Leadership Institute. It’s a sweet little acronym called “P.O.P.” – standing for Purpose, Outcome and Process. Given the state of my memory, I lunge at anything this easy to remember. And this fast. Sure, it may take a bit more 30 seconds sometimes, but it’s still pretty snappy and massively effective.
Here’s a snapshot of P.O.P. And really, it’s so straightforward, this is all you need:
- “Purpose” answers the question “why”
- “Outcome speaks to “what” – the vision of what success will look and feel like when you ‘arrive’
- “Process” speaks to “how” – the specific steps involved in getting there.
Straight from the Source
The “P.O.P.” model was devised by brilliant leadership consultant (and fellow Rockwood trainer) Leslie Sholl Jaffe and her partner Randall Alford. As they describe it, “POP is a useful tool for a multitude of the daily activities leaders find themselves faced with: meeting agendas, campaigns, difficult conversations, unplanned calls and conversations… As you can gather from the list, POP is scalable, it can be used for large, long term projects, regular weekly staff meetings, a meeting you attend or a call that comes in that has no agenda, coaching/mentoring sessions…”
Case in point: Workshop Design
Last week I met with a small team of folks designing a workshop within a larger conference for immigrants and refugees. We started by stepping back and asking: what is the overall purpose of this workshop? Why now? Why here? How can it advance our particular focus on supporting skilled immigrants and refugees in the job market? Then we asked: if this workshop were wildly successful, what would the outcome be? In other words, what does success look like, in concrete terms? Only then did we address the process – the specific format, agenda design, room set-up, breakout size etc.
Cart before the horse…
All too often, action-oriented social justice and not-for-profit leaders jump straight into planning the process of calls, meetings and entire projects – without first nailing down a clear sense of the purpose and outcomes. In practice, it’s vastly more effective to “go slow to go fast”. Even doing a quick “POP” for simple tasks, I’ve found, can save hours of time, and help ensure that your creative energies are aligned and vastly more effective from the start.
Suzanne Hawkes 
Where can I find more details about the origins of POP and recommendations on how to use it and teach it?