4 ms·

Will I be the first one to quote Eisenhower? "Plans are nothing, planning is everything." The act of planning implies careful thought. "Guessing" implies a h

Will I be the first one to quote Eisenhower? "Plans are nothing, planning is everything." The act of planning implies careful thought. "Guessing" implies a haphazard attempt at divining the future. I'll stick with the former.

bockris 17y ago
That quote is hanging in my cube at eye-level. Related: "A plan is a list of things that don't happen." (which Google tells me is from a movie called "The Way of the Gun")
Edinburger 17y ago
Well said. 37s have missed some important points: * A plan is a statement of your intentions at the time it is written. * Writing the plan helps to clarify your understanding of the problem, forces you to consider difficult issues and acts as a communications tool to enable your team to pull in the same direction. * All plans should be adaptive. * Plans contain estimates, not 'guesses' * Good planners can manage (but not remove) the risk around those estimates.
GHFigs 17y ago
The act of planning implies careful thought. An educated guess is still a guess. The point is that no amount of planning will guarantee a real outcome. A plan isn't any more real than a guess, and the only difference is the degree of confidence, which thanks to optimism bias may not even be justified by the data used to generate the plan. This may feel good insofar as the point of planning is to reduce anxiety (individual and institutional) about possible outcomes, but too much faith in planning can mean both wasted time developing and false confidence in what is essentially a guess. I agree with Jason that referring to these things as guesses assigns them the appropriate status. As he says, there is nothing wrong with guessing, just with overthinking and overvaluing them as though they are something more concrete than they actually are. The basic principle here is to favor constant feedback from the real world over carefully thought out fantasies about what might happen. To adapt instead of predict. It is a common pattern, seen in the OODA loop and manuver warfare, in TPS and Lean, in Agile, XP, and Scrum. All of these incorporate a de-emphasis on planning and favor adaptation to current circumstances.
- alanthonyc 17y ago
  An "educated guess" is an educated guess. As opposed to a guess based on ignorance. However, this isn't even the point. The purpose of creating the plan is not to have a plan. The purpose of creating the plan is to go through the exercise of planning. When he invaded Europe, he had a plan. I'm pretty sure that things did not go according to it. I'm also pretty sure no one would argue that it was still a good idea to have one. Planning doesn't just make you "feel good", it better prepares you for the possible situations that come up and allows you to react better to them. There is nothing inherent in planning that precludes you from "gathering feedback from the real world" or from adapting to circumstances. "Adapt instead of predict" - this is where our viewpoints diverge. You see planing as a an exercise of prediction. I see it as preparation. This is why you equate planning with guessing and I see it as getting ready for what will happen next. (Heck, maybe he's talking specifically about those "business plans" that VCs supposedly are always asking for but supposedly never read.)
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    As opposed to a guess based on ignorance. Nobody is arguing for ignorance. That's not an argument made in either the original post or in mine. The thesis is that what people call planning is usually guessing and should be treated as such, not that making informed decisions is bad, not that guessing is bad, and not that planning is bad. You say planning is preparation, but preparation for what? You are necessarily making predictions about what will happen in the future and what the appropriate course of action will be. The ideas are inseparable. Again: not that this is bad, but it is still guesswork--still map, not territory--and should be de-emphasized relative to dealing with the territory itself. How much you devote to it depends on the costs associated with speculating on a course of action. Is this time spent planning going to save more time of work? Are the consequences of these possible situations worth the effort expended to prepare for them? If you're (say) coordinating hundreds of thousands of people to invade Europe, the cost of speculating and preparing is dwarfed by the cost of changing course to react to new developments. On the other end, especially when it's an individual or a small business, sometimes the cost of speculating on a course of action is higher than the cost of just putting it into practice.

bockris 17y ago

That quote is hanging in my cube at eye-level. Related: "A plan is a list of things that don't happen." (which Google tells me is from a movie called "The Way of the Gun")

Edinburger 17y ago

Well said. 37s have missed some important points: * A plan is a statement of your intentions at the time it is written. * Writing the plan helps to clarify your understanding of the problem, forces you to consider difficult issues and acts as a communications tool to enable your team to pull in the same direction. * All plans should be adaptive. * Plans contain estimates, not 'guesses' * Good planners can manage (but not remove) the risk around those estimates.

GHFigs 17y ago

The act of planning implies careful thought. An educated guess is still a guess. The point is that no amount of planning will guarantee a real outcome. A plan isn't any more real than a guess, and the only difference is the degree of confidence, which thanks to optimism bias may not even be justified by the data used to generate the plan. This may feel good insofar as the point of planning is to reduce anxiety (individual and institutional) about possible outcomes, but too much faith in planning can mean both wasted time developing and false confidence in what is essentially a guess. I agree with Jason that referring to these things as guesses assigns them the appropriate status. As he says, there is nothing wrong with guessing, just with overthinking and overvaluing them as though they are something more concrete than they actually are. The basic principle here is to favor constant feedback from the real world over carefully thought out fantasies about what might happen. To adapt instead of predict. It is a common pattern, seen in the OODA loop and manuver warfare, in TPS and Lean, in Agile, XP, and Scrum. All of these incorporate a de-emphasis on planning and favor adaptation to current circumstances.

alanthonyc 17y ago
An "educated guess" is an educated guess. As opposed to a guess based on ignorance. However, this isn't even the point. The purpose of creating the plan is not to have a plan. The purpose of creating the plan is to go through the exercise of planning. When he invaded Europe, he had a plan. I'm pretty sure that things did not go according to it. I'm also pretty sure no one would argue that it was still a good idea to have one. Planning doesn't just make you "feel good", it better prepares you for the possible situations that come up and allows you to react better to them. There is nothing inherent in planning that precludes you from "gathering feedback from the real world" or from adapting to circumstances. "Adapt instead of predict" - this is where our viewpoints diverge. You see planing as a an exercise of prediction. I see it as preparation. This is why you equate planning with guessing and I see it as getting ready for what will happen next. (Heck, maybe he's talking specifically about those "business plans" that VCs supposedly are always asking for but supposedly never read.)
- GHFigs 17y ago
  As opposed to a guess based on ignorance. Nobody is arguing for ignorance. That's not an argument made in either the original post or in mine. The thesis is that what people call planning is usually guessing and should be treated as such, not that making informed decisions is bad, not that guessing is bad, and not that planning is bad. You say planning is preparation, but preparation for what? You are necessarily making predictions about what will happen in the future and what the appropriate course of action will be. The ideas are inseparable. Again: not that this is bad, but it is still guesswork--still map, not territory--and should be de-emphasized relative to dealing with the territory itself. How much you devote to it depends on the costs associated with speculating on a course of action. Is this time spent planning going to save more time of work? Are the consequences of these possible situations worth the effort expended to prepare for them? If you're (say) coordinating hundreds of thousands of people to invade Europe, the cost of speculating and preparing is dwarfed by the cost of changing course to react to new developments. On the other end, especially when it's an individual or a small business, sometimes the cost of speculating on a course of action is higher than the cost of just putting it into practice.