Impact Planning

Impact planning is the proactive mode of growth. It encourages people to think ahead about the impact they want to create, the opportunities available to them, the skills they intend to use or develop, and the behaviours that will support their success. This shifts growth from reactive “what happened this quarter” thinking to intentional, strategic action. It’s where personal ambition meets organisational value.

Planned Impact Topics Canvas

The “Planned Impact” section of the framework is ultimately a visual planning tool designed to make intended impact strategically visible. In the example above, the planned impact topics are structured into two distinct zones: the top half (pink tickets) captures impact directly related to your role, while the bottom half (yellow tickets) surfaces impact tied to broader organisational efforts you’re involved in beyond your role. This separation is intentional: it helps distinguish between core responsibilities and cross-functional contributions, while still treating both as valid and valuable sources of impact related to your growth.

The above example also shows a hierarchy, with the left hand tickets representing a thematic area (e.g. grouped by themes relating to topics ranging from QE, Tech Services, and Enterprise Delivery, to Culture Building, Career Frameworks, and Reward Systems). Within these rows, colour-coded sticky notes represent the individual impact topics being tracked. The colour key adds an additional layer of metadata, helping you track not just the impact topics, but also the status of them, which helps in understanding when to pivot in collecting evidence and feedback to help you grow further.

The tickets are also ideally templated to explain: what the impact is, on who, through doing what actions.
The intention of the format options is to help people think – it’s often easier to talk about the tasks and actions you are doing (thats what 99% of the growth frameworks you’ve used in the past have forced you to focus on talking about), so starting with that might be relatively easier. From there, you can progress in thinking about who you are impacting through those tasks: Is it yourself? Your team? Another team? An org area or domain? The whole company? Your customers/users/clients? The business? The industry or external communities? etc. And after you have detailed who you are impacting, the final thought is regarding in what way you are impacting them.

Thinking about and writing down the details of the impact you are making on people can be hard at first, as it seems rare to have thought about this if you have been operating in a task-based growth system for a long time. Sometimes it can be easier if you relate it to Objectives or Goals, if your company use OKRs (objectives and key results) or KPIs (key performance indicators). The following passage is an example of how Impact is the cherry on top of OKRs and KPIs, to help you detail the full narrative of the impact:

Let’s use swimming as our example.
Imagine you set yourself a bold personal objective: Become the fastest person to swim one length of an Olympic‑sized pool.

Great. We can turn that into a clear OKR.

• Objective: Become the fastest person to swim one length of an Olympic pool.
• Key Result: Beat the current world record — 20.91 seconds for men or 23.61 seconds for women.

So far, so good. Now we break this down into initiatives with KPIs that track your progress:

• Hire a training team – KPI: Bring in the right number of specialists with the right skills.
• Follow a structured training regime – KPI: Complete a specific number of reps, exercises, and sessions per day.
• Adopt a nutrition plan – KPI: Hit your calorie and food‑group targets consistently.
• Spend time in the pool – KPI: Achieve a set number of hours swimming each day.

Each KPI represents a level of performance that, if met, increases your chances of hitting the Objective.
This is the classic OKR system working exactly as intended.

Now imagine you do it. You hit the time. You break the record!
You are officially the fastest person to swim one length of an Olympic pool! Amazing!!… But then what?

Most people immediately look for extrinsic rewards: the bonus, the pay rise, the promotion. And sure, if those rewards come, they feel good… briefly. But they don’t sustain motivation into the next quarter. And if the reward doesn’t come, morale drops. Hard.

And here’s the reality: OKRs are usually quarterly. No company can hand out pay rises and bonuses every three months just because someone completed Objectives to the expectations specified in the Key Results.

So what keeps you going?
This is where impact becomes the cherry on top.

Let’s rewind that celebration moment:
“YES! You’re the fastest person to swim one length of an Olympic pool!  AND… look at the impact you’ve created:

• Your friends and family feel enormous pride after supporting you through the journey.
• Your training team gains reputation, credibility, and pride from helping you achieve something extraordinary.
• The next generation of children who witnessed what you just did are now inspired to get in the pool and learn to swim.
• Your competitors have witnessed that records can be broken, and are motivated to push harder and elevate their own performance to try to beat yours.
• You, yourself are impacted: your confidence, your reputation, your personal brand, your future opportunities, your sense of what’s possible. – you grow!

This is the part most people skip, but this is the part that actually fuels long‑term motivation, growth and ultimately that sense of purpose which brings happiness. Just going through this example, you can get a sense of how powerful it can be to shine a light on the impact you have on people from your actions. It really gives that deep sense of purpose.

When you understand the impact your actions have on people, you tap into intrinsic motivation… The kind that lasts beyond a quarter, beyond a KPI, and beyond a bonus cycle.

Impact is what gives your work meaning.

Impact is what connects your effort to something bigger.  

Impact is the cherry on top.

The Impact Planning structure is ultimately here to encourage proactive planning of the impact you want to make – that forward-looking future progression you are aspiring to make – identifying where you want to make a difference, and then aligning your skills, behaviours, and time accordingly. And as you make your impact, it becomes easy to manage the transition towards capturing the evidence of your impact you have made, and targeting feedback requests on the impact made, to the people who you have directly impacted too.

The board also reinforces the framework’s core principle: impact is not confined to your job title. By visualising contributions across different domains and initiatives, it validates the breadth of influence individuals can have. It also helps teams and leaders see how distributed efforts ladder up to strategic outcomes.

In short, this section turns abstract ambition into tangible, trackable action. It’s a living map enabling you to project manage your growth, planning and choosing your impact to make, and detailing how that impact translates into real-world value.