I have a confession to make.
I love strategic planning. I find almost everything written and presented about it unbearable.
That tension has followed me for three decades — through planning processes as an employee, a manager, a consultant, a coach, and an advisor. The work itself, I find, is genuinely compelling. There is something deeply satisfying about helping a person or an organization get honest about where they are, clear about where they want to go, and intentional about how they’ll close that gap.
The way we talk about it, though. The flip charts. The Post-it notes. The vision statements drafted by committee and laminated onto a wall nobody looks at. The two-day retreat that produces a document that quietly expires in a shared drive while everyone goes back to doing what they were already doing. I’ve lived that story too many times to pretend it doesn’t exist.
So when I started sharing my own approach to strategic planning with small business owners and entrepreneurs, I ran into a problem. I believed in the process. The people I worked with needed it. But the moment I opened my mouth to explain it, I could feel the room go somewhere else.
I needed a better way in.
Where Peter came from
A few years ago I tried to use a short story to introduce my Next Best Step Strategic Action Process in a workshop. It didn’t work. What I produced was, in the words of the people who stayed after to tell me the truth, a thin layer of story over an overly complicated explanation of the concepts. They liked the idea. The execution was lacking.
That critique stung the way accurate feedback always does. But it also did something useful — it sent me looking for a better story.
I don’t know exactly when the raccoon showed up. I was thinking about how to build a narrative around a start-up scenario, something that would resonate with the solo entrepreneurs and small business owners I work with most. Someone in my practice group mentioned that raccoons are called trash pandas because of their reputation for raiding garbage cans. The idea of a raccoon who wanted to break that stereotype — who had something more in him than the garbage — caught me.
Peter the Pottery Panda was born out of that conversation.
What the story is actually about
Peter works the day shift at a refuse management company, sorting trash with the nimble fingers raccoons are known for. He’s good at it. He’s also miserable. After every shift he goes home to his treehouse and makes pottery — plates, cups, bowls. His favorite are the small finger bowls raccoons use to dip their food in water before eating.
One day he brings a finger bowl to work. A coworker named Ricky can’t stop talking about it. At the end of the shift, Peter gives it to him.
That small, unplanned act of generosity starts a business.
What follows is Peter learning — in real time, while also making pottery and managing orders and losing sleep — how to build a strategy around something he loves. The process he works through is my Next Best Step Strategic Action Process, and watching Peter live it is a different experience than reading about it in a framework.
It starts with a question most planning processes never ask: what does success actually look like? Not what problems need solving. Not what’s broken. What does the business look like when it’s working the way you want it to? Peter imagines this almost playfully — watching a silent film of his business at its best, writing down what he sees. From that picture everything else follows: clear themes, honest measures, a specific finish line, and a sober look at the distance between where he is and where he wants to be.
Then he looks at the terrain. Not with a SWOT analysis — though it covers the same ground — but through the lens of an airplane in flight. What gives him thrust? What creates drag? What winds are at his back, and which ones are pushing against him? The metaphor sounds simple because it is. That’s what makes it work.
Then comes the hardest part: turning good intentions into specific action. Peter builds what the process calls SMART Waypoints — not vague goals but dated, measurable commitments that create a path rather than a destination. A weak strategy says purchase a new kiln. A SMART Waypoint says research at least five kiln models by August 1st, identify three financing sources by August 5th, and create a sales trigger that funds the purchase by mid-October. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between a plan that happens and one that doesn’t.
And then — this is the part most planning processes forget entirely — he ends well. Peter doesn’t let the plan quietly expire when November comes. He throws a party. He rests. He reflects on what worked and what didn’t, writes it down, shares it with the people who supported him, and only then begins thinking about what comes next. That rhythm of act, reflect, rest, and begin again is not a footnote to the process. It is the process.
The part I didn’t plan
Here is what surprised me about writing this book.
I went in thinking I was building an extended metaphor to explain a planning model. What I ended up with was a story about a whole person trying to build a whole life, not just a business. Peter’s struggles with loneliness, with losing his hobby to his work, with imposter syndrome, with the near-constant temptation to just keep grinding instead of resting — none of that was in the original outline. It grew from the character.
There’s a scene where Peter can’t sleep because a supply chain problem threatens to derail everything before it starts. He gets up, reads something a friend posted about gratitude, and starts listing what’s going right. The list grows longer than he expects. The fear doesn’t disappear, but it shifts. He finds clarity he couldn’t access when he was running on anxiety.
I didn’t put that scene in to teach a lesson. I put it in because it’s what Peter would have done. But more than a few readers have told me it’s the moment that stayed with them longest.
The other thing I didn’t plan was how much the community around Peter would matter. He has the Raccoon Practice Group — a small circle of fellow entrepreneurs who offer support, accountability, and the occasional hard truth. His key stakeholders aren’t just names on a contact list. They show up. One plays guitar at the Launch Event. Another bakes brownies. They go raccoon bowling when Peter’s stress reaches its limit.
That last detail is not decoration. It’s the point. Peter nearly cancels the bowling trip because getting work done seems more important than spending a morning with friends. He goes anyway. It saves him. The business leaders most likely to succeed with a strategic plan are rarely the ones with the most sophisticated framework. They’re the ones who build around themselves a small group of honest people who care whether they make it.
A book built for how busy people actually read
One more thing worth mentioning, because it shaped every structural decision in the book.
I love to read. What I actually love, if I’m being precise, is reading things I’m interested in and skipping the things I’m not. Most business books have fifty pages of content padded into two hundred and fifty. I wanted to write something that respected a reader’s time and trusted them to go as deep as they wanted — no further.
So each chapter ends with a URL and a QR code that opens into a full library of supplementary material — videos, articles, interactive PDF workbooks, exercises for applying each step of the NBS process to your own situation. The book itself stays lean. The deeper resources are always one scan away for the reader who wants them.
I think of it as the difference between a well-made finger bowl and the whole pottery studio. The bowl is complete and useful on its own. The studio is there if you want to learn how it was made.
What I hope you take from this
If you are a business leader who has grown tired of the way strategic planning gets talked about — who has sat through the retreats and written the statements and watched the momentum dissolve — I wrote this book for you. Not to convince you that planning works. You probably already know it does. I wrote it to offer a way in that doesn’t feel like a compliance exercise.
Peter is a raccoon who makes finger bowls. He is also, I think, recognizable. He works hard, doubts himself, needs people around him more than he wants to admit, and finds that the thing he does best is the thing that most lights him up. Strategy, for him, isn’t a document. It’s a practice of paying attention to what matters and moving toward it on purpose.
That’s all intentional progress ever really is.
The Pottery Panda: The Art of Intentional Progress is available through IntoWisdom Publishing. Resources for the Next Best Step Strategic Action Process — including the Finding Your Next Best Step online course and interactive workbooks — are available at the store on IntoWisdomGroup.com.
John Losey is a coach, consultant, and facilitator who has spent thirty years helping leaders and organizations find clarity, build strategy, and move forward with intention. He is the founder of IntoWisdom Publishing and the creator of the Next Best Step Strategic Action Process, which he delivers through courses, workshops, and the Guided Practice Group community. He lives and works in the belief that good planning and good storytelling are not as different as most people think. You can follow his work and Peter’s continued adventures at IntoWisdom.com.
© 2026 The IntoWisdom Group.
(AI was used in this article for research, grammar, and feedback. All content is the work of the author. The author has significantly edited any contributions from AI.)
(Images by Gemini AI)
This article first appeared on Medium.