The federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau has launched a five-year initiative that will support state efforts to build comprehensive early childhood service systems. This initiative--the State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems Initiative (SECCS)--provides two year planning grants followed by three year implementation grants to the 50 state Maternal and Child Health agencies. The purpose of these grants is to help coordinate, integrate and improve the access to, and the quality of, health, early education, parent education, and family support services for young children and their families. The Initiative seeks to help assure that all children enter school healthy and ready to learn, and achieve the fullest possible social and emotional development. This paper sets forth a disciplined thinking process designed to do these things--to help identify actions that will measurably improve the lives of children, families and communities. It is now being used, in whole or in part, in at least 40 states and eight countries. It breaks with past planning methods in several important ways. First it begins with discipline about language and the use of words to label ideas. Second, it posits a sharp distinction between accountability for the well-being of whole populations and accountability for the performance of programs, agencies and service systems. And third it offers a common sense progression of work, from talk to action, that produces effective actions with minimum paper. The approach offered in this planning guide can be used to structure the planning process, and future iterations of the planning process, to produce the legacy of results we want for young children and their families. The following are appended: (1) Resources; (2) A Tool for Choosing a Common Language; and (3) Results-Based Decision Making: Getting from Talk to Action. (Contains 3 figures and 34 footnotes.) [This publication was produced by the National Center for Infant and Early Childhood Health Policy, an active collaboration between the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities, the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP), the Women and Children's Health Policy Center at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).]