Why Your Plans Fail
Business plans, diet plans, plans to get a degree and your plan to get rich. Life is full of planning. You’d think that all your practice planning would make you at least somewhat good at it. Then why do so few things go “according to plan?”
Your business can’t make money the way you intended. You quit your diet on day three and start eating the chocolate cake. You realize that you hate the subject you’re studying. The map rarely matches the territory. “Okay,” you might say, “I’ll admit some of my plans didn’t work out perfectly, but it can’t be that bad, can it?”
The Planning Fallacy
People are notoriously bad at planning. The worst part is, we don’t even know it. One psychological study conducted asked students to predict when they expected to complete an assignment, almost none gave enough time. Other looks into financial analysts show that few can consistently beat the market.
The real problem is that these planning failures aren’t recognized. People make wildly overconfident projections but fail to notice their abysmal track record in predicting. The question is, what can you do about this?
New Planning Techniques Aren’t the Solution
The problem isn’t a better planning method. We’ve all had a great deal of practice planning. Different planning styles can help, but they can’t solve the core problem of uncertainty. That is, you have no idea what the future holds.
The planning fallacy creates two major problems – the inability to plan and being blind to that incompetence. The real solution is to keep a careful eye on your track record and learn to stomach uncertainty.
Watching Your Track Record
The way to tackle overconfidence is to be aware of your success rate. Whenever you make plans, keep a record of occasions you were forced to deviate from them. I’ve done this, and the differences between your map and reality can be surprising.
How does humility help you? We’ve all been told to have faith and certainty in our efforts, otherwise it is too easy to give up. I’d argue the opposite. When you are motivated to do something, being humbled about your ability to predict forces you to be highly flexible.
Stomaching Uncertainty
Does risk make you queasy? Stomaching uncertainty is the next problem. Once you become aware of your inability to plan, you need to find a way to make the unknown tolerable. There are a couple ways you can do this: worst-case planning and flexible planning.
Planning for the Worst
One way to mitigate the actual risk is to plan for the worst cases possible. The point of this is to make you aware of the negative outcomes, and knowing you can handle it. The worst-case rarely materializes, or if it does, it usually happens in a way you didn’t expect. Worst-case planning can’t give you a look at everything that could go wrong, just a bit more confidence in knowing you can handle it.
The other benefit of worst-case planning is it balances the built in optimism plans have. Most people can’t distinguish between their best-case plans and expected plans. In other words, when predicting the future they imagine the most optimistic scenario possible.
A common rule I heard in software development was to figure out how long it should take. Then double that time and add six months. For your best-case. This adjustment was another method to offset the natural optimism in predicting.
Flexible Planning
The second option is simply not to plan. This may seem crazy, but I’ve found using what I’ll call a “flexible planning” model to be ideal for areas where there is a heavy amount of uncertainty.
Flexible planning isn’t planning in the traditional sense. Traditional planning involves looking at your outcome and devising a route to reach there. Flexible planning defies this entirely by not focusing on an end result. Instead, the emphasis is placed on doing actions that will place you in more favorable positions.
Flexible Planning VS Traditional Planning
Traditional planning starts with your objective and works backwards from that. Let’s say you were planning out what career choice you wanted. A traditional approach would be to work out your career choice, possible firms to work with, education you’ll need, classes you’ll need to take and how to fund your education. Each step determining the one before it.
The problem with this method is it cleanly erases uncertainty along the way. What if changes happen in the industry and firms you want to work for start downsizing? What if your school of choice doesn’t accept you? What if you don’t like the classes or eventual career? What if you can’t fund tuition?
Flexible planning starts where you are and works forward. So your current position might be limited post-secondary schooling and funds. Flexible planning suggests that many outcomes are favorable and that the paths to get there are almost infinite. Instead your job becomes to put yourself in increasingly more favorable positions.
The next step might be to get some schooling, apply to different Universities and scholarship programs or work to earn money for tuition. The best step is the one that has the most favorable options flowing from it.
In a business context this would mean planning your business so that it would have the largest amount of opportunities available. This way if one of your original plans fails, you can easily switch to another.
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Comments
James says on October 9th, 2007 at 11:30 am
It’s one thing to plan – you can have the most detailed plan covering every eventuality – but it’s something else entirely to actually follow through with your plan. Whether it be writing a to-do list for the day or a plan for a meeting, you need to learn to make promises to yourself to actually follow them through.
Spike
Organize IT
Sean Oliver says on October 9th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Good thoughts. Thanks for the post. I do need to keep track of actual vs. plan.
Josh D says on October 9th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Life is what happens while your making other plans.
The best laid plans of mice and men…
Been there, done that..
Productivity blog says on October 9th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
I don’t agree with “Planning for the Worst” point. All this point it is very used by a lot of people, I think this is not good. This is because from my experience it causes negativity.
I’d rather prefer to use do flexible planning as suggested!
Sven Lankreijer says on October 10th, 2007 at 2:47 am
Planning for the worst dos not work in my opinion. e.g. if you give someone 1 day to complete a task he will finish it in 1.5 day. if you give him the same task and give him a week he will finish it in a week. There has to be presure on a planning to make the most out of the time needed you can use a pool of time or recources not jet apointed to a specific item as a buffer.
GreatManagement says on October 10th, 2007 at 3:34 am
I think the actual planning is the easy bit. Yeah we are all, over optimistic and experience helps improve that. However, the biggest issue is then delivering the plan. And that comes down to discipline, organisation, hunger, passion, asking for help/support, reviewing the plan, getting back on track……..that’s the hard bit.
Andrew
David Turner says on October 10th, 2007 at 6:29 am
Responding to Sven Lankreijer: I’m not sure that’d be my interpretation of planning for the worst. If you have a task that should take a day, give the person you assign it to a day but expect it to be done in two days. Don’t tell them you actually expect it in two days, or they won’t prioritise it as highly and it’ll slip to even longer.
Jeffrey S. says on October 10th, 2007 at 10:44 am
When planning you always think of the things you think of but you never include the things you don’t think of. I always add some untargeted resources, (time/money)for those things that will surely “come up.”
Chris W says on October 10th, 2007 at 11:28 am
I agree with Andrew and David Turner. The planning is the easy part and the most fun. The execution takes the willpower to constantly refer back to the plan, refine plans, and review the work being done. Also it takes enough foresight to under-schedule your people so they get things done early/on-time. The most difficult way to plan is when there is NO time to underschedule people and things need to be done correctly and delivered on-time.
Another thing about planning when you’re at the helm, is persistence and confidence in your plans. Most of the time the end result is possible, and regardless of what comes in your way the show must go on. Your confidence and vision will radiate outwards to the people actually executing the plan.
Renato says on October 10th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Good post. As a urban planner, and a planner theorist, I could see many of my problems described in it.
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Nevertheless, I don’t encourage the use of “flexible planning” (known in planning theory as “incremental planning”) because you lose a very important benefit of planning that is its capacity to generate focus and make our actions work in a more integrated way.
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Moreover, planning isn’t just about following the plan. Its benefits start with the reflection and (in some cases) the collective discussions it generates. The dissemination of information is one of the major advantages obtainde from planning processes.
Cal says on October 11th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Scott,
Interesting post. Another element to add is the importance of information in planning. That is, only plan so far as you actually have a good estimate of how much and what type of work is required to accomplish the plan with high probability. Many of us have a tendency to reach a little far by letting our plans get hazy.
- Cal
Mark says on October 12th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Cal, I like what you said about the type of work you are planning. Some goals can involve a lot of uncertainty and some will involve very little. You would need different strategies depending on the amount of uncertainty.
In the case of a relatively short term task, say one day, you wouldn’t expect a lot of uncertainty. The human mind can grasp and focus on that fairly easily.
In the case of achieving a career goal. That is a whole different ball game. Were talking a time scale of 10-20 years. Where economies can rise and fall and even your own desires can change.
I would say that in the first case you could use a fairly highly structured plan and expect a low variance in the outcome.
In the second case I would go with the “improve from where you are” kind of planning and constantly evaluate your goal at each step.
Thanks for this topic Scott. I’ve always despised planning, being no good at it. And having it always cause a great deal of stress. But that’s because I thought there was only one kind ok planning.
I still think some people put too much demand on accurate planning. While it is nice for a client to say I want this done by such and such a date and to cost this much, I think no matter how skilled you are at planning, it is impossible to plan accurately 100% of the time. Should the world ever come to a time when this is possible, it would be a very unpleasant world indeed.
"Madame Monet" says on October 13th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
I found your blog a couple days ago and love the helpful articles you write.
This is an interesting subject. Traditional planning is mostly possible in a First-World culture, and next to impossible living in a Third-World country (where I now live these past fifteen years). The process you describe as “flexible planning” is now what I do–and learning to do this was one of the biggest adjustments I had to make to living in a Third-World culture.
Best regards,
“Madame Monet”
winewriter.wordpress.com
“Writing, Painting, Music, and Wine”
Jocelyn says on October 15th, 2007 at 3:27 am
Great, helpful post. I’m certainly taking these tips to heart. I like the idea of ‘flexible planning’.
Rufus Williams says on December 22nd, 2007 at 3:46 pm
plans need to be possible, long range, short range, written, ajusted frequently.
Thus both flexsable and classical.
Dcrad says on January 24th, 2008 at 8:35 am
A really good post, and all these years I’ve thinking I never planned properly, when all along I’ve been flexible planning.
My mother would be so proud :o) he he