Worthless Plans. Indispensable Planning.
“We will exceed $XXM in revenue over three years.” I listened to a start-up entrepreneur confidently showing projections.
The auto dealer estimates one hour but uses the whole day to service my car. I counted on writing one chapter of my book in just a few hours. It took me the entire week to write it. We can’t accurately forecast or estimate a few hours or days. How can we expect to predict longer projects with precision? All longer-than-one-year projections are guesses, a shot in the dark.
I asked, “How will you get the customers in the first few months? How do you expect to grow from 5 users to 50 users? Over how long? How will you keep them satisfied? How will you get that one large client in the first few weeks or months? How will you bootstrap when starting?”
Focus on the burn and your path toward achieving near-term milestones. Near-term details matter more than unproven and unsupported assumptions. It’s better to make just-in-time decisions. Identify the best next step and act on it.
Businesses face the paradox of why planning is worthwhile while the underlying plan is worthless. We strongly care about a glimpse of the future. Satisfying, yes, but not that useful. What is helpful, though, is that you plan hard for the year—taking relevant individual data points into account- and then be prepared to treat your plan as if it were written on an Etch-a-Sketch.
Encourage uncomfortable questions and concerns.
We all know how the power of groupthink supports mindless plan-following caravan behavior. People mindlessly follow the plan, not challenge it. Those who dare to differ are troublemakers. Pay serious attention to them and their uncomfortable questions and concerns.
Befriend ambiguity
Being ambiguity-friendly is often challenging because the entire C-suite almost always wants certainty. They are skeptical of fuzzy-math questioning and resist changing their stance in public, which is a sign of vulnerability. Employees follow the same behavior—imitating bosses to get promoted. Are they dangerously locked in?
Unearth vulnerabilities.
Form red and blue teams. Empower the red team to identify undetected vulnerabilities. Another way is to pretend everyone who wrote the plan was fired. The axed authors of the plan will quickly shred the assumptions.
Build a culture of agility by challenging assumptions and encouraging the free expression of silent thoughts. Deny not the changing circumstances, but do not overreact.
I would love to hear about your experiences! Please share your stories at satish@dhaakar.com. Please forward this knowledge letter to those who could benefit from it. They can subscribe to it here or by clicking on the link below.
Thank you,
