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The problems of excessive planning
Wednesday, 1 November 2006
The 1916 Battle of the Somme between German and Allied forces was one of the bloodiest in history. Between the 1st July and the 18th of November that year, France and their allies from The British Empire lost 145,000 men in the battle and suffered over 600,000 casualties . Germany lost 164,000 men and had over 450,000 casualties.
The battle was triggered when a British plan to capture areas around the Somme River in Northern France was followed. The area had been tied up in trench warfare for a long time, and the Allies were hoping to break the stalemate
The plan's main architect was General Douglas Haig. His great idea was to bomb the German trenches with heavy artillery for five days, hopefully destroying most resistance, then send tens of thousands of troops to invade. Unfortunately, the artillery campaign wasn't as successful as anticipated. The Allied troops went over the top of their trenches into "No Man's Land" and found themselves sitting ducks for the German gunners. On the first day of the planned invasion, 20,000 Allied troops were killed.
Despite these devastating losses, General Haig pushed on with his plan. He was apparently reluctant to give it up. His stubbornness led to one of the biggest bloodbaths in history. The outcome was that after months of fighting and dying, the Allies gained a mere 5 miles of land.
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I've worked in software development for a long time and have been put onto a lot of projects. Usually, within a few weeks of starting work on a project, I have a pretty good idea of whether it's going to succeed. More often than not, this early call of mine turns out to be correct.
One sign that's always a dead-giveaway that things aren't going to work out, is if large amounts of up-front planning is being done. If the manager wants to spend a lot of time documenting every last little thing before doing any real work, then the project always ends up being doomed. In fact, I've seen projects with no planning whatsoever succeed, but I've never seen one with excessive planning do so.
How come? You'd think that careful planning would lead to success. Common-sense says the more you plan, the better the outcome will be.
But in this case, I believe the conventional wisdom is wrong. It took me a while to figure it out, because the idea that more planning is better is a hard one to shake off. But in most areas including those outside software, too much planning seems to be a big fat negative.
I've thought about this a lot, and have come up with a few reasons for why this may be the case.
Firstly, a lot of planning is just procrastination in disguise. Talking about, and writing down, how you're going to change something about the world is much easier than going out and actually doing it.
Writing down a plan to say land group of people on Mars is easy. Actually doing that would be mind-bogglingly hard.
Most procrastinators are always talking about how they're going to do this or that big and amazing thing. Often, they write down all sorts of details for wants that never get realized.
Planning gives you a warm feeling inside that you're doing something really worthwhile. It seems like productive work, but usually it's not.
You can feel as if you're making real progress when you're analyzing and strategizing, but it's important to realize that nothing in the world has actually changes as a result. The main outcome is generally a few worthless pieces of paper that will never be read.
Secondly, planning allows you to engage in wishful thinking. People often try to dress up their plans as conservative and serious by filling them with big words and technical terms. They assume they have such a strong understanding of, and control over, reality that they can determine how it will behave in advance. But reality doesn't care about our hopes and dreams. It's completely indifferent to what you want to do. It's also much more - staggeringly more - complicated than most planners anticipate.
I've written about how bad we humans are at prediction before, and this is no different in the area of planning. Any sort of strategy involves assumptions about how the future will look. But the only really accurate thing you can say about tomorrow is that it has a never-ending capacity to surprise us.
Many new businesses find that their market is completely different from how they anticipated it being, and have to shift accordingly. Plans to save for a first home can go quickly awry when prices rise rapidly or a new spouse turns out to like playing fast and loose with the credit card. Career strategies can be sent spinning when the company you work for collapses unexpectedly in a storm of scandal.
Any detailed plan is bound to be filled with assumptions that seemed reasonable at the time, but turn our to be wildly wrong when exposed to the cold winds of reality.
Finally, I think the biggest problem with detailed plans is that they lead to inflexibility. General Haig was unable to see how his careful battle plans were costing thousands of lives. In software, I've seen many projects grind to a halt when reality doesn't fit what was planned for and the manager refuses to change direction.
Once you've committed yourself to a detailed strategy on paper, it can be difficult to make adjustments. Doing so is often tantamount to admitting, both to yourself and to others, that you were wrong and possibly stupid - something many people are obviously reluctant to do. There will always be pressure to push on into a "death march" long after it's become obvious the strategy is flawed.
I'm not claiming you should never plan anything, simply that you should realize the common tactic of detailed analysis and strategy is based on a fantasy. The best way to change the world is to go out into it and try things out, learning from your stumbles and mistakes along the way. Almost all the most successful systems follow this idea - from capitalism in business, to experimentation in science.
Use plans to set goals about where you want to be and to give yourself some kind of high-level direction on how to get there. But spend more time on preparing to adapt to the inevitable changes the world will throw at you and the unexpected opportunities that will be offered up.
Excessive planning in almost all fields is simply not a smart way to operate . It's time to stop pretending otherwise.
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