"No plan survives contact with the enemy" more or less sums this up. I see it as a trade-off - you do need a lot of flexibility to adapt to unexpected things a

"No plan survives contact with the enemy" more or less sums this up. I see it as a trade-off - you do need a lot of flexibility to adapt to unexpected things and disappointments and successes, but at the same time, you need to make good decisions fast. Planning is basically speculative decision-making, and that's valuable. The kind of planning that I think works better is a web-style plan - less focused plans that cover more contingencies and are applicable in different circumstances. Have a general idea of what to do as a response to major stimuli, and have some ideas of things which build well upon each other. "Well, if we have a lot of users, we can leverage that to do X" is a plan that works somewhat independently of how you got those users, for instance. "If we wind up needing to boost traffic at some point, our ace-in-hole can be Y", or "If Z happens, we can capitalize on that by doing Q".