Planning for execution

When execution is important, when results are key, planning is paramount. But planning is a concept completely different from a plan. The quote from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was the starting point for a reflexion on planning:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

What is so different from plans to planning that changes them from useless to indispensable?

• A plan is an option, planning is a process. This seems to be the obvious one, but it is the key. A plan is a document, a fixed decision on what to do, an immovable list of steps to go from A to B. Planning is a mental process, it is the way our mind is structured to find posible scenarios and look for solutions in any of them.
• A plan fixes an scenario, planning is flexible. When we take over a specific plan, there is an implicit assumption of what will happen. Is it really sure, or is it just a simplification that keeps our conscience clean? Instead, planning prepares the organisation for the unexpected; different scenarios are evaluated and different set of decisions, skills an tools are developed or adquired to manage all the relevant ones. Flexibility is key also to decide which scenario we are in – or which part of the analysis is useful with the actual situation, and take the best decisions.
• A plan is created from experience; planning process requires imagination. Experience is, sometimes, not as useful as we would like to think. Experience tells us what worked in the past in a very concrete past environment. Experience tells us also that, probably, something will not happen just because it did not happen in the past. But are we sure that it will not happen this time? Are we sure that the same actions will lead to the same results again? Certainly not. We propose to move onto a different paradigm: don’t think what will happen but what could happen, and let’s define what is needed in that posibility to be successful.
• Plans are about control, planning is about alignment of wills. When we follow a plan, the main thing to be done is checking that all the steps are fulfilled. But if we did the proper planning, what is checked is that our actions lead to the best results in the scenario we are living. It is about remembering what has to be done in that scenario; and since the team has spent a lot of time defining those actions, this process is fast and aligned. There is no need of excess of control or overhead for synchronization; that is implicit in the planning process.

Let’s put an example. Planning is what an architect does when they think about evacuation routes in a new building. They think about all the possible combination of events, locations and moments that event can take place. All the possible actions and mechanisms can be defined and qualified. A discussion between the architect and the users of the building will be very useful at that stage, because some assumptions could be wrong and some elements could not be understood. This is the right moment to create alignment, to clarify the “what-if’s”. When an event occurs (a fire, an electrical outage) execution is the only priority.

At TM=GR* we think that planning is key and this is one of the principles that apply to our projects, because we think that successful business are not those with better plans but with better planning skills that drive execution.