Planning is for doing
biggestfish.substack.com
Planning is for doing
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: Planning is for doing
#2The author thinks the parable they heard concerning silly traffic priority negotiation would be too horribly impractical to occur in real life; but they clearly have never been on a winding (mostly) single lane coastal road in Southern Italy, e.g. Amalfi. Silly and impractical negotiation between drivers is exactly how it works, or rather, doesn't. Although in this case it manifests the complete absence of planning rather than too much (the point of the article), because nobody sane would plan to allow tourist busses to travel bi-directionally on a geographically-constrained winding road that barely enables small cars to pass two abrest in many places.
Re: Planning is for doing
#3I work in crisis management, sometimes on tense, hours-long outage calls. Very often, engineers or others on the call will say things like "It would be nice to run test $x before we move forward."
It basically always pays to ask a counter-question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?"
Often the answer is no, so we can skip doing the test and get to remediation faster.
Once you notice this pattern (it's clearer in outage situations where moments matter), you frequently catch people (including yourself, if you're honest) seeking information that they don't even /plan/ to use as an input to some decision or action. In other words, there is no conceivable future where the answer to some proposed question would have an effect on their actions. If you find such a situation, you can at minimum remove answering that question from the critical path, and possibly just never bother finding the answer at all.
That doesn't mean that having such information is bad, just that we should think of the cost of gathering suit against its likelihood of mattering in terms of our actions. In fact, possibly one of the central purposes of IT broadly is to lower the cost of answering such questions, so that we can afford to ask more of them.
Re: Planning is for doing
#4> Finally, the third, and most pernicious situation in which there is too much planning is when planning becomes its own end. This can happen because individuals in organizations get more reward for planning work than actually executing on it. It might be seen that the execution is the “easy part”, and can be done by anyone, whereas the grand visionary (or “architect”) is the real cause of success.
I've experienced this happening due to an influx of people into an organization who simply can't execute -- middle managers come in with impressive resumes but little understanding of the problems that need to be solved. When results aren't delivered, they default to extensive planning processes because it creates an appearance of work. There's lots of tangible outputs (market studies, reams of wiki pages and documentation that are written, fancy slide decks, plenty of presentations...) yet nothing that provides actual value to customers. They know execution is the hard part, they just can't do it, so they stay in planning mode endlessly in order to provide an illusion of productivity, and to keep their job.
Re: Planning is for doing
#5The William James quotation at the end should not be presented as a single one. An ellipses should only be used if they were from the same paragraph. Actually, the two parts are from distinct passages several sections appart.
Re: Planning is for doing
#6I work in crisis management, sometimes on tense, hours-long outage calls. Very often, engineers or others on the call will say things like "It would be nice to run test $x before we move forward." It basically always pays to ask a counter-question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" Often the answer is no, so we can skip doing the test and get to remediation faster.…
> question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?"
This is my absolute favorite question. I am continually amazed at how much crap it can cut through.
Re: Planning is for doing
#7A couple of things this makes me think of:
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
It's a military saying but I think it applies equally to business. I think that's the whole point of rubrics about how much you need to talk to customers.
When seconds count, the police are minutes away.
Said by pro gun people. I'm of mixed feelings about that but I still like the saying very much to encapsulate an idea about making hard decisions in critical situations when time is of the essence. It's similar to the military saying Sometimes, a 90 percent solution now is better than a 100 percent solution later.
Re: Planning is for doing
#8I’ve developed a way of working, where I start with a “rough napkin sketch,” and begin writing, quite early[0]. I also try to get a high-quality (but incomplete) working prototype available as quickly as possible.
A very important part of my process is the “don’t try this at home, kids” part. It requires a great deal of architectural and implementation experience. Lots of scars and a pronounced limp.
If I describe this to folks, they tend to freak out, but it works on my machine…
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/forensic-design-docu...
Re: Planning is for doing
#9The driving parable reminded me of my one and only time driving in the USA. The thing that absolutely did my head in was the intersections with four-way stop signs. There was no clear indication of who had right of way which I would have thought would cause a lot of collisions. It just seemed like the biggest bully goes first.
Give me roundabouts any day.
Re: Planning is for doing
#10I work in crisis management, sometimes on tense, hours-long outage calls. Very often, engineers or others on the call will say things like "It would be nice to run test $x before we move forward." It basically always pays to ask a counter-question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" Often the answer is no, so we can skip doing the test and get to remediation faster.…
> question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" This is my absolute favorite question. I am continually amazed at how much crap it can cut through.
My favorite when making long term decisions is "Do we need to make the decision between these choices now, or can we proceed keeping all the choices open and make the decision later?"
Sometimes there's a belabored debate between two choices and answering this question can reveal that the choices don't have to branch right now, that they have (or could have) a shared 'path prefix', enabling us to make the choice later when we have more information.