Conquering Planning
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There's a lure to big upfront design.
I've done it so many times myself, standing in front of a empty whiteboard I've worked with many teams to start to imagine and cook up the future. I believe this process is healthy, but one of the temptations is that if you just planned 'enough' you could eliminate all problems and everything would just tick along. Sometimes things work this way, often they don't. For highly stable processes, upfront planning works surprisingly well. Take conference and event planning for example. The process of organising a conference really benefits from some solid up front planning. Beyond that being organised is just starting early enough before the event, having the organising team meet regularly and ticking off key tasks as they come up. Running a conference flow though is different, ideating involved lots of mental thrashing and brain popping and chucking bad concepts and ideas out.
Making the flow work when you'll be the one delivering the message is an act of raw creativity. Sure there are a few useful markers, create intimacy early, know your key objective, distill the unspoken challenge before us and passionately encourage everyone to take up a cause, but beyond that the ‘how’ is not formula driven. When I would run strategic weekends for executive roles of past, I would often go to the library and grab a stack of books that were strategically on topic. Over a weekend with core leaders, we'd stare out across the waves of a generally oceanside apartment and forge what's next. I think this type of planning works. I think it's good for business and good for the soul. Charles Darwin always regretted the phrase 'survival of the fittest', not because of the religious fervor it generated but rather because it fundamentally misrepresented his key insight. His realisation was that it was not the survival of the fittest or strongest but rather survival of the most adaptable. If the fundamentals had have been different, then maybe it would have been a T-Rex lording over the park I’m currently sitting in , rather than myself, a hairless ‘monkey’ sitting here writing this post. Big thick ‘good-on-paper’ plans are an example of the ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality. May the thickest, baddest, meanest, most-wordy plan win. In truth, behind every thick report is someone ‘assing it’. Most of us have been there, the spec is that our org needs to write a 50 page report because that is the requirement. The artform is to spin words until the 50 pages becomes a coherent whole, it needs to read nice. It needs to inspire certainty. But we all know every business plan or investment prospectus in the world can't be relied on alone to make good decisions and make plans happen. Other messier aspects such as people and leadership and politics and silent assumptions come into play. I mean if you want to just make decisions from paper, then forget the report and ask for a cash flow projection, they’re just as inaccurate, but at least fit on one page of paper, the cynical accountant in me jibes. So when you are listening to some business guy in a suit (look, I've been one), listen to the one that talks of uncertainty being inherent, and that risk is a fickle bedfellow. Don't sign up with the shiny guy that tells you that solid reports and good proper management will save you. Trust yourself a little more than that.
