18-Month Sunset
A phased 18-month plan to deliberately retire the legacy annual planning cycle while standing up Woodring's Loop — so the two systems never compete for senior attention.
What 18-Month Sunset is.
18-Month Sunset. The 18-Month Sunset is a sequenced operating commitment for retiring the annual planning cycle as the Loop is installed, with named milestones and owners across board, audit, compensation, and capex. It treats retirement of the old discipline as the explicit objective — not a downstream consequence of installing the new one.
What it is
The Loop is a replacement discipline, not an add-on. Run it alongside an intact annual cycle and the organization pays a tax in attention — half the team asking what the plan says, half asking what the signal layer is telling them — and the foresight function gets starved out within twenty-four months. The 18-Month Sunset is the executive-and-board commitment that prevents that, naming a real retirement date with real owners rather than leaving the old cycle to drift into a half-life. The retirement is the work; the installation is the easier part.
The phases
The Sunset runs in four phases of roughly equal length. Months 1–3: the Loop runs in shadow mode beside the intact annual cycle while the signal layer builds. Months 4–9: dual-run — the Loop's outputs start driving Stake decisions, the ninety-day marathon compresses to forty-five days, the November freeze shrinks to two weeks, and the board sees its first scenario brief. Months 10–15: the marathon is formally retired, audit-relevant pieces are mapped into the Loop's controls, comp is restructured, and the board operates on the quarterly scenario brief. Months 16–18: full Loop operation across board, audit, comp, and capex, closing with a formal retrospective.
Why 18 months
The legacy cycle has too many load-bearing functions — board approval, audit controls, comp targets, capex governance — to retire all at once, and the organization needs to watch the Loop produce real decisions before it will trust the retirement. Eighteen months is long enough to sequence the political problems in parallel and short enough to stay a finite phase rather than a permanent shadow state. The closest historical analogue is Ford's Business Plan Review under Alan Mulally — proof the pattern is doable in a 200,000-person company on roughly this timeline, but not without an executive sponsor willing to spend personal capital on retiring the old discipline.
Common questions.
- Why can't you just add the Loop on top of the annual cycle?
- Because senior attention, budget, audit, and comp all follow the calendar — and the calendar still says November is plan season. Left additive, the Loop becomes a side project with no claim on the resources or conversations that move the company, and it gets starved out within twenty-four months, usually during the next budget cycle.
- What actually gets retired during the Sunset?
- Three pieces of the legacy cycle don't survive: the ninety-day annual planning marathon, the November-December board freeze, and the set-and-forget budget envelope. Three survive but mutated — the board strategy conversation becomes a quarterly scenario brief, capex governance becomes a continuous reversibility-tested envelope, and compensation decouples onto an eighteen-to-twenty-four-month outcome horizon.
- What kills an 18-Month Sunset?
- Four predictable failure modes: keeping both systems indefinitely and never pulling the trigger, an executive sponsor change mid-transition, finance rebellion from an FP&A function whose role the old cycle defined, and board overreach that re-imposes the annual ritual under a new name. The defense is to name the retirement date up front and make the Sunset a board commitment that outlasts any single sponsor.
Source: Chapter 12 — Killing the Annual Cycle · Predictive Planning (Colloquial Media, 2026)
More of the vocabulary.
- Woodring's Loop
The four-phase continuous cycle at the core of predictive planning — Scan, Story, Stake, Steer — that turns weak signals into strategic decisions.
- Cycle Audit
A diagnostic that measures what your annual planning cycle actually costs — in senior attention, budget, and frozen strategic conversation — before you decide to retire it.
- AI/Human Split
The allocation rule inside Woodring's Loop: give the volume work to the machine and keep the judgment work for the people whose names are on the decision.
- Stake Sizing Matrix
A decision tool in Woodring's Loop that sizes any strategic commitment against two axes — the team's conviction in the scenario and the cost of being wrong.