A Plan Is A Guess

The future is unknown. Plans are guesses. Chaos theory says that even small changes can have big effects.

Just as you can’t predict the specific weather more than days in advance, you can’t predict your specific work very far in advance. You can however predict the likely weather based upon the season, just as you can predict the likely work based upon similar past projects.

Using past experience, experienced humans can see how to get from A to B optimistically via the shortest path, without any complications. This is the planning fallacy. There are perverse incentives to present this plan. It’s the one that gets funded.

This plan is a bad guess.

Collective bottom up estimation is amazing for overcoming the planning falisy, by having a group of people imagine every possible item of work and every possible thing that can go wrong. No one will fund this plan.

This plan is also a bad guess.

By merging these two plans, and squinting your eyes to hide the details, you can get an okay plan. Even though this plan is still a guess, it is useful in broadstrokes, because everyone can get on board with it.

Because of chaos theory, a plan as a contract will get you into trouble. Instead, a great plan is a statement of shared intent, which outlines what really matters with just enough detail to feel believable. Ideally any agreement, acknowledges that the plan is just an educated guess.

My most successful projects were funded to deliver X but incrementally delivered A, B, C, V, and Y instead, which is what the customer really wanted. By showcasing incremental progress, the customer can refine the plan within our budget and timeline. At this point, we can specifically forecast one to two weeks of work. And like the weather we can reforecast daily and weekly.

A plan, like the weather forecast, will need to be refined over and over. Therefore a plan is disposable and shouldn’t take too much time to create. By acknowledging a plan is not a contract but a guess, our team can plan quickly, and spend more time delivering value and responding to change as necessary.