I’ve been down in Cornwall again all of this week for the offsites that I run every quarter. This week, because it’s Q4, we’ve been looking ahead to next year, and doing a day of annual planning alongside our normal day of quarterly planning.

This is the first time we’ve done annual planning in this new system, so there are lots of learnings to take from it. But it went well, and I’m pleased with it.

One of the crucial things, I think, is not holding yourself to the same level of detail that you do in your quarterly sessions. We’re not trying to assign goals or figure out specific actions for the next year. Instead, we’re just trying to think about what large things there will be to work on next year, that will demand and deserve the company’s whole focus.

It also felt important to put this next year in context. It doesn’t stand alone, after all: it needs to advance us towards where we’re ultimately heading. So we invested some time early in the session to take everyone through the board’s five-year plan and to think together about how the next year would, all being well, get us a fifth of the way towards where we want to be in five years’ time.

Part of that planning involves thinking about the longer-term stewardship of the business, and trying to ensure that it’s around for generations to come. I’m really interested in this; I’ve written about long-lived, sustainable businesses before. I’m really keen to understand how to create structures that incentivise – and ensure, even – the creation of businesses that last for the long term and do good while they’re at it. If you’re interested in doing similar things, let me know and we can bounce some ideas around.

Annual planning also feels like a particularly good opportunity to take a step back to reflect on the accomplishments and milestones of the year, while they’re still fresh in everyone’s minds. It was extremely heartening – moving, even – to step round the room and listen to what everyone thought were the milestones of the year: everything from the collaborative culture of the business through to specific new hires and the bringing in-house of capabilities that the business previously relied on external partners for.

Finally, we did a high-level collaborative budgeting process, with everyone working together to understand what everyone else needed in terms of investment, and then trying to collectively prioritise things. That way, we could identify tensions (“you want that bit of kit, but who’s going to operate it?!”) and could prioritise things in a way that felt opaque, reasonable, and fair – not just “the FD says no”.

It’s only a prelude to a more detailed budgeting process later, but it felt successful as a starter. People understand how big the scope for investment is, what we simply must do, what we definitely won’t do, and what the priorities are within the messy middle that remains.