I’ve been facilitating a group of staff who have been challenged by their senior leadership team to complete some Innovation Projects as part of a current leadership development programme. I introduced them to GIST Planning

1. © 2019 Copyright ISC Ltd.
GIST Planning for
Innovation Projects
Ian J Seath

2. © 2019 Copyright ISC Ltd.
GIST: Goals-Ideas-Steps-Tasks
 Based on articles by Itamar Gilad and Pavel
Kukhnavets

3. Innovation projects – the need
 I’ve been facilitating a group of staff who
have been challenged by their senior
leadership team to complete some Innovation
Projects as part of a current leadership
development programme.
 The timescales are tight, the projects run
over the Summer holiday period and the
teams generally have more ideas than they
can cope with in the time available.
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4. I introduced them to GIST Planning
which helps them set out their:
 Goals – what they want to achieve or improve
 Ideas – all the ideas they’d like to try that will
contribute to meeting the Goal
 Steps – the main chunks of work associated
with each idea
 Tasks – the detailed activities within each of
the steps
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Tasks
Steps
Ideas
Goal Improve
x by y%
We
could…
Do this
first
Task 1 Task 2 Task 3
Do this
next
Then do
this
Idea
2…
Step 1
Task A Task B Task C
Step 2

6. Example
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Reduce use of plastics
in the office by 25%
Goal
• Introduce recycling champions
• Develop a Comms strategy
• Conduct a plastics audit
Ideas
• Identify current waste levels
• Identify good practices
Steps
• Locate recycling points
• Sort by type of waste
• Measure daily weights
Tasks

7. You can use Mindmapping for GIST
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Goal
Idea
Steps

8. SmartArt in MS Office – GIST Hierarchy
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9. GIST is…
 An agile planning tool
 Ideal when you only
need a “light-touch”
approach to planning
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10. GIST helps you clarify Goals
 Goals are what you
want to achieve
 They describe new
levels of performance
 They answer the
“why?” question
 “Produce a toolkit” is NOT
a Goal
 A toolkit might enable you
to increase income (a Goal)
 “Upgrade the IT” is NOT
a Goal
 Upgraded IT might enable
you to reduce downtime (a
Goal)
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Increase… Reduce…

11. GIST helps you to…
 Turn ideas into
actions
 Kill ideas where you
can’t work out any
steps to implement
them
 Break work into
manageable chunks
 Size and prioritise the
effort needed
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12. Flexible planning
 The GIST approach doesn’t force you to plan
every idea down to the task level.
 You can easily prioritise the order in which
you want to work on the ideas.
 As with Scrum and agile sprints, you can re-
prioritise based on your learning from what
you’ve already done.
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13. © 2019 Copyright ISC Ltd.
GIST Planning for
Innovation Projects
Ian J Seath
www.improvement-skills.co.uk
ian.seath@improvement-skills.co.uk
@ianjseath