Having made the decision about how to proceed, you will now be supporting people through a detailed planning phase. In this stage, you can find that people start to feel a little overwhelmed by the scale of the task. During the planning phase, you will go into detail about exactly which tasks need to be done when and by whom. Your stakeholders will start to realise how much work is involved. Frequently, they will be doing this work at the same time as other duties. People often now start to feel demotivated and feel that the change is tough.

During Plan, you will be drawing on the strength of the relationships and trust that you have established in the early stages of the change. You will need to display patience, resilience and often drive and tenacity in this phase. You can use the tools in this stage to help people break down tasks and to help them assign responsibility for those tasks. You will also find tools here to assist with delegation, involvement in planning, conflict resolution and agreeing quality requirements. In addition, it is important to maintain a sense of fun during this stage, celebrate small achievements and to remind people of the end goal. You should seek to ensure that there are deadlines to this phase and that people are able to move to action as soon as possible.

At one end of the scale, failure to plan properly means that the Implement stage may be delayed or not happen at all. At the other end of the scale, the risk is that people move back to previous stages; most commonly, they seek to choose another option or ask for another review.