Plans vs. Planning: Ditch the Rigidity, Embrace the Process

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” the words of Mike Tyson. This was his response when asked about his upcoming fight with Evander Holyfield.

It sounds very similar to many other men of violence via the great work of the Quote Investigator.

In 1871, Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder said No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.

This is often shortened to No plans survives first contact with the enemy.

A war correspondent in 1877, from the British newspaper, “The Daily News” wrote about the challenges the soldiers faced with staying to the plan.

Possibly, such movements did not enter the original plan; but plans are worthless when the fighting is once begun, and all depends on the inspiration of the moment.

In 1941, Winston Churchill, his book A Roving Commission: My Early Life” he wrote –

Writing a book is not unlike building a house or planning a battle or painting a picture. The technique is different, the materials are different, but the principle is the same. The foundations have to be laid, the data assembled, and the premises must bear the weight of their conclusions. . .

The whole when finished is only the successful presentation of a theme. In battles however the other fellow interferes all the time and keeps up-setting things, and the best generals are those who arrive at the results of planning without being tied to plans.

Now comes the line most people probably know, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” This was reported by the New York Times in 1957 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He went on to say that in an emergency, the first thing to is “to take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window.”

“But if you haven’t been planning you can’t start to work, intelligently at least,”

Agile, Waterfall, It Is All Useless

Because we live in an era where tech is consuming everything, agile has become the method de jour.

Like every other work process, it has its pros and cons. There is nothing inherently good or bad about it. Nor Waterfall before it, Gant chants, diving meaning from where the moon is in the sky.

They all suck equally the same.

They suck because they are the way to look at the work to be done. They do not tell you what work to do.

They are all secondary to having a strategy about what is important, and what you think the world will be like in the future.

It is always this way. ALWAYS. It is always what is important, and then you figure out whatever work methodology you want.

The methodology will not figure out what work is important.

Cha Cha Cha Changes

As I wrote last week, the world is a complex, ever-changing and adapting system.

Yes, your strategy will not be perfect. Yes, the priorities will change and shift over time. No, this doesn’t mean you should not do it.

All the quotes above stress the idea that the specific plan is not important, because things will always change. There are unknown unknowns that will appear and change what you are doing.

The quotes also talk of the importance of doing some planning. This means having a thought process on what is important. Having an idea of what success looks like, and a process for what you will do until everything changes.

A weak leader thinks because things change there is no point in being very deliberative and disciplined in their thinking process.

Why is this? Because it is hard and scary. The unknown is scary and having to make choices with unknown variables means you will most likely be wrong.

This is why it is so powerful to develop a way to approach what is important, and that will mean whenever the environment changes you have a framework to understand what work you should do.