The first casualty is the plan.
Uselessly sitting on the shelf, most business plans provide about as much value over time as a chocolate spanner (fun if consumed in the moment, not actually fit for purpose for maintaining your car). Yet a huge emphasis is placed on planning in many quarters.
The old idiom “To fail to plan is to plan to fail!” somehow resonates, leaving us feeling like we should have a plan. And frankly, you need a plan if you want to get a truly amazing engineering feat accomplished.
So why are there so many contradictions around planning and its value? Here are three thoughts.
1. Planning can reduce risk by eliminating unknown variables.
Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century head of the Prussian army, famously observed: “No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.” Considering that what Helmuth was referring to was actually that in a combat situation, there are so many unknown and random variables that any plan you make will likely go straight out the window the second fighting starts.
This is worthy of your attention because if your plan has you growing the number of unknown variables as you get deeper into it, then its very likely that your plan is a huge waste of your time.
Another way to put this is that your unvalidated assumptions (of which in early stage startups there are many) are a terrible basis on which to formulate a plan of action.
The more precisely you know the moves of an opponent, the easier it it for you to plan accordingly — and thus have your plan be a design for victory. There is a really nice ninja move here though: Plan around the things you can control with near certainty, and that planning will have much higher value than a plan based on things that are totally out of your control.
Of course the more concrete and credible intel you can gather also can add huge value to your planning, especially things that are externally validated. It’s one thing to have your marketing manager show you his or her market analysis. It’s another to tally up actual trends in the numbers of invoices you are raising to customers that are getting paid.
Use planning to reduce the number of variables out of your control, and it’s powerful.
Great planning is solid; it takes out the risks as you go. It guides you away from the variables that are out of your control and replaces them with tangible facts that result in clear, credible and concrete actions, the sum of which amount to an actual thing. Unfortunately great planning is often uncomfortable because it requires facing up to the truth.
Bad planning creates visionary castles in the sky. No matter how good it makes you and the team feel, and no matter how pithy the resulting vision and mission statement, it’s all likely hollow and a big waste of time. Most brainstorming results in this kind of lunacy.
2. Procrastinating is not effective planning.
Obvious as this might appear, the unfortunate reality is that a lot of time gets wasted in the name of planning. So let’s be straight, planning is in and of itself NOT productivity. That is not to say don’t plan, or that planning is worthless. It is just to highlight that planning is far too often used as a signal of productivity where none in fact exists.
Planning, especially bad planning, can be both highly visible and lots of fun, a kind of lego-like daydream land where everything works out for you because you plan it that way — or worse, a kind of recidivist habit of doomsaying that prevents any action from being taken. In either case, it’s procrastinating that is going on and not planning.
There are simple ways to tell the difference between procrastinating and planning. Take a look at the data being gathered: Procrastination will nearly always have an abundance of irrelevant and or unvalidated data associated with it. Real planning, like good marketing material, will be clear, concrete and credible. It may even be simple and surprising.
Take a good look at the planners around you, ask them to show you the results of their research and intel gathering, and test the objectivity. If there is a preponderance of subjectivity, then procrastination is likely. If there is a lot of objective information, then some real planning may be going on, and if that is the case look further to see if the planning is narrowing the number of variables or if the scope is expanding without management of the variables and risk.
Real plans are concrete. They describe actions to be done with time and resource allocation, and even though they may have elements of vision, that is in service of making it clearer for people the context in which the plan is to be executed. Real plans are not there to make you feel better — they are there to have you do better.
3. Without a clear purpose your plans will likely suck.
Very few things are less efficacious nor more odious than a purposeless plan. If you cannot articulate what you are there to do, then any plans you make are akin to masturbation. They are utterly without use. The grandest vision and mission in the world rings hollow without purpose.
It is insufficient merely to have a purpose. For a purpose to be effective it must be well articulated, shared, and taken up by others. Any organization that does not have a clear purpose will inevitably have people and systems that work across purposes, which at best will result in massive waste and at worst will end in failure and actual harm.
Many things can go into a plan to serve the purpose. Counterintuitive and contradictory actions may be planed and undertaken effectively in service of a unified purpose. When you have a purpose you have a simple test that can be applied to planning both initially and on the fly in order to provide choices of planned activities to adapt to a changing situation.
If your purpose is to win the war at any price, then there are actions that can be planned and executed that would not be acceptable if your purpose would be instead to win the war with as few casualties as possible. In such a scenario, a plan of retreat or to evacuate wounded may serve as effectively as a plan of attack in order to achieve the purpose.
The opposite of purpose is entropy, so to plan without purpose is a powerful pathway to failure.
Bill Liao is Managing Director at RebelBio and General Partner at SOSV.
Originally published at sosv.com on July 27, 2015.
