If you landed here looking for a secret to successful enterprise planning, I’m sorry to tell you this but there isn’t one. The only secret is the one people don’t talk about because they’re too busy trying to look good — and that is that enterprise planning works best when you air all the dirty secrets of what could go wrong.

Executive-level operations planning often subscribes to the idea of the more, the merrier. And while it’s true that being stingy on your human resources will likely result in burnout from people stretching themselves too thin, you could also wind up with a case of too many cooks in the kitchen.

What’s the deal with consultants? These people come into your business, poke around, and undermine your tenured staff’s way of doing things. They hand you a lengthy report of everything you’re doing wrong and how to fix it, usually from a standardized playbook that they rehash time after time, void of any practical takeaways but rather ripe with theories and jargon.