Planning 2027 on Deliverability, Instead of Availability
Tis the season to plan! Across the majority of industries, leadership teams are heading to retreats, locking themselves in boardrooms, and scrambling to pull together reports. They’re all filling in the same spreadsheets:
2027 revenue targets
2027 headcount
2027 initiatives
Most of those plans will share a commonality: they’ll be built on availability. They’re considering one question: How many people do we have to complete this work?
That is building a plan based on availability.
At The 128 Collective, we define capacity as four things working together: skill, context, cognitive capacity, and available hours. Most of these 2027 plans will only look at that last metric, and it’s why they’ll be scratching their heads when the beautiful plan isn’t working in March 2027.
So let’s pressure test your 2027 plans, together, look at some industry forecasts for 2027, and share a glimpse into how we perform annual planning at The 128 Collective.
Your estimates are likely optimistic, which is normal
One of the best-documented findings in decision research is the planning fallacy: we consistently underestimate how long our own work will take, even when we know similar work ran late before.
The classic study comes from psychologists Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They followed 37 psychology students working on their honors theses. On average, the students expected to finish in about 34 days. They actually took about 55, and only around 30 percent finished by the date they had predicted. The same people were less optimistic when estimating how long other people would take.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s how people predict their own work. But it means a plan built from “how long will this take?” estimates is likely to be optimistic before the year even starts.
Hours are not interchangeable
The second problem is that an hour of focused work and an hour sliced between six projects are not the same hour. Enter, the cognitive capacity conversation.
Organizational researcher Sophie Leroy calls this attention residue. She coined the term for what happens when people can’t fully focus on the task in front of them because part of their attention is still on something else. Her 2009 study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes showed that switching between tasks has a real cost beyond the minutes it takes to switch.
In a services firm, that money is burned when your senior strategist is split across seven accounts. Instead of 40 hours of senior strategy, you get a fraction of that expertise across all seven accounts, and a whole lot of burnout.
Four questions to ask your 2027 plan
Before your 2027 plan is locked, ask:
Skill: Does each major commitment have someone who can actually do it, or are we assuming someone will grow into it?
Context: Can the people doing the work find what they need without asking someone else?
Cognitive capacity: How many active projects is each person carrying? Where are we asking people to switch constantly?
Hours: After meetings, admin, and internal work, how many hours are really left for delivery?
2027 Forecast for Professional Services
The most widely used benchmark in professional services is SPI Research’s annual Professional Services Maturity Benchmark. The 2026 edition drew on 509 organizations representing more than 245,000 consultants and $63 billion in revenue. Consultants are considered any staff at a firm or agency, so those could be W2 employees with positions such as “Digital Marketing Specialist”, “PR Lead”, “Software Engineer”, etc.
The headline finding from the report published in February 2026 was, in 2025, billable utilization fell to ~66%. The lowest this industry has seen in awhile. However, professional services grew by 5.2%. So if revenue is up, and billable utilization is down…where does that leave us?
Utilization is a dying metric, as technology advancements push contract value towards outcomes versus hours. It also presents a wonderful opportunity to encourage strategic planning to look at deliverability metrics, instead of availability metrics.
Why AI Can’t Fill the Gap
Many firms are simply assuming artificial intelligence will be able to help them close the utilization gap and skyrocket profit margins. Some will succeed. Most will not.
Effective use of AI requires a very mature, well oiled infrastructure. Which is a common challenge among growing organizations.
The research on AI productivity is encouraging, with an important catch. In one of the most rigorous real-world studies so far, economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond, writing in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, studied more than 5,000 customer-support agents and found AI assistance raised productivity by about 15% on average.
How We Are Planning For 2027
We use the same approach with our own firm that we use with clients.
Capture: We started by listing everything already on our plate going into January, including client work, internal projects, and the commitments that we can’t always see. We also created our wish list for 2027.
Connect: We tied every item back to the outcomes we want in 2027. Anything that didn’t connect to an outcome became a candidate to cut, or at the very least — challenge.
Clarify: We compared the list against real capacity: who has the skill, the context, and the focus to do each piece. What is our staffing strategy going into 2027? What technology, processes, and people do we need to support these goals?
Control: We know that a plan can be great, but behavior drives the plan. Based on everything we want to accomplish in 2027, we get real on what behavior needs to drive that and build in accountability check-ins to ensure as an organization, we’re moving with purpose and intention.
Planning this way is less exciting than writing a big list of goals. But there’s a reason we are known for our dependability, and a lot of that ties back to how we work our strategies.
