Always Begin with the Situation. Before working on your plan, first understand the situation and its brutal facts. To be effective, you'll need to understand the situation both:
The latter is essential because you cannot persuade someone to change their mind if you do not know what is on their mind.
A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation. -Richard Rumel