
Planning is overrated. The best performers seesaw between ideas and actions. - l0stman
http://www.tompeters.com/dispatches/009986.php
======
wccrawford
As usual, life is not black and white, it is grey. The best performance can be
obtained by:

Idea(s) Plan(s) Action(s)

Of course, the trick is to know when to switch from one to the other.
Generally, I like to take an idea (or ideas) and think about them for a while.
When I feel vaguely comfortable that there are no obvious roadblocks, start
planning. When I'm vaguely comfortable there are no subtle roadblocks, it's
time for action. If you hit a roadblock, it's back to the ideas phase.

This strategy keeps you moving forward, bring fresh information quickly, and
avoids most roadblocks before they waste any time.

Depending on the scope of the idea, the planning could be anywhere from
minutes to days. Scope and complexity also change whether the planning happens
purely in my head, or requires some typing to get everything clear.

Luckily, life usually gives us ideas while we're working on something else, so
there's time to think about an idea for a while before you even have time to
take action, which gives some planning time.

~~~
skowmunk
I agree. It is never black and white, and the applicability of any rule or
principal also depends on the context.

A small company cannot afford to do planning like that of a billion dollar
company.

A billion dollar company cannot afford to plan like a small company (that is,
not do much of planning). And for both, the folly always is in waiting for
completing the perfect plan, before acting, because there is nothing such as
the perfect plan.

Note: 'Afford' as not just in money terms, but the risk of taking the extra
time to plan.

------
edw519
_The problem I had was that Clinton's principal associate is Ira Magaziner,
the same "intellectual" who was the schemer-in-chief behind "Hillary care" in
1993._

The problem I have is that Tom Peters is the same "intellectual" who continues
to say less with more words that any other "business guru" on the lecture
circuit.

Funny how often over the years he has been wrong with his McKinsey-like advice
while the world changed under his feet.

Funnier is that the guy who skims the surface of everything, never digging
down below one level is telling us hackers to act without realizing that this
is one audience you can't bullshit.

Examples of Peters' charlatanism are everywhere. Just a few:

<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/53/peters.html>

<http://www.sathnam.com/Features/31/tom-peters>

[http://www.amazon.com/Witch-Doctors-Making-Sense-
Management/...](http://www.amazon.com/Witch-Doctors-Making-Sense-
Management/dp/0812929888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284909029&sr=8-1)

~~~
cal5k
It's odd, because I don't get the same sentiment from reading the two articles
you've cited (I haven't read the book).

Essentially, you're upset that the man's predictions have often been wrong.
Big whup. Show me one billionaire or nobel prize-winning scientist who hasn't
been wrong hundreds of times and I'll show you a liar.

What you should get out of Tom Peters' manic style is, if anything, that you
should always question business as usual because shit is going to keep
changing. That's it. If you're taking his (or anyone else's) advice as a
prescription for how you should think, act, or feel - you're a fool. Advice
should merely serve as fodder for thinking, for shocking us out of doing
things just because we've always done them that way.

If you form your own opinions, there's no need to go foamy at the mouth when
someone else's turn out to be wrong.

~~~
edw519
_If you form your own opinions, there's no need to go foamy at the mouth when
someone else's turn out to be wrong._

Maybe not.

But then again, this is a guy who has built an entire career (and industry, in
fact) on exactly the opposite of what most of us practice here at hn.

While we build, he talks.

While we test, he guesses.

While we ask, he tells.

When we're right, we deliver value, When he's right, people just say, "Of
course."

When we're wrong, shit stops working. When he's wrong, the PHBs still keep
writing him checks.

When the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, someone should say so. Especially
here.

~~~
cal5k
Just like models and actors have built entire careers (and industries, in
fact) on just standing around and pretending to do things?

Tom Peters does not pretend to be a hacker.

Hackers are not the only sort of people in the world.

Peter Diamandis, for example, is a personal hero of mine and a champion of
industry. Does he run unit tests? No. Does he personally build spacecraft? No.

Does that make him any less valuable as a thinker and leader?

~~~
godDLL
Sure it does. He is the living embodiment of "you can just go around talking
shit", he's irrational. You can call him an abstract painterly post-modernist
thinker, or whatever, just don't go supporting his way of being by putting
meaning where there is none, you'd be giving people false hope, so to say. And
that really murders, and subsequently mutilates your inner child.

Night.

------
simonsquiff
"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but
planning is indispensable." Eisenhower - one of my favourite quotes that sums
this up well.

~~~
jamesbritt
It's similar to practicing scales or intervals on the piano. You'll rarely
have to play those sequence of notes just like that, but the practice still
prepares you for other actions.

------
da5e
This is a fecund article as evidenced by the excellent comments here it has
sparked.

My half-serious takeaways are: Peters mistakes overplanning and over-
complexifying for systems thinking.

Some things really are complex. They stretch the boundaries of Einstein's idea
that things should be as simple as possible but no simpler.

Anyone who thinks rapid prototyping is "play" hasn't been in a high-intensity
production environment.

Peters is a popularizer but he sure can get the mental blood flowing.

You can't define a minimum viable product with which to start prototyping
without some good planning/thought.

Perhaps to belabor the analogy, part of getting ready to fire is some amount
of aiming.

The rap (deserved or not) on Microsoft is that it does the worst of both
overplanning and then releasing products (prototypes?) that the customers have
to "test". Slow-prototyping?

I like Bloomberg's quote, "We act from day one..."

The oil hunting analogy shows Peters' basic idea flaw because in order to
drill test wells you have to read maps and study. Plus lack of planning can
get very expensive in that field.

Was it Beckett who said, "Fail better." Even that requires planning along with
the experience.

Attributing the loss of the House to "Hillary care" is solidly in the "dumb-
simplifier" category.

Good enough depends on very intelligent implementation and feedback. Going off
half-cocked is fine if the foreplay is effective. :-)

There is a difference in writing in which all your rapid prototyping is done
in your drafts than in putting out an under-developed product. Although there
are some experiments with crowd-sourcing writing too.

I liked this submariner catch-phrase, "Water in the people tank."

One comment said: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other
plans." John Lennon My thought was, "So is death."

Ah lazy Sunday mornings.

------
akadien
Planning for planning's sake is not the same as planning to act. Big
organizations typically fail to see the difference because the price of
failure is too high for them compared to smaller, more nimble orgs.

------
bmr
The fact that many "performers" are somewhat unfocused doesn't mean that
planning is overrated. These people would likely do even better with a little
more discipline.

It just that big successes more often come from people with lots of ideas and
lots of experimentation as opposed to people who pick relatively unambitious
careers and rotely execute day after day.

------
zb
I don't understand where systems thinking comes in to this. Because anybody
who has thought at all about systems will realise they the are complex and
hard to predict (because we can't know everything about the system), and
therefore that the way forward is to make small changes and see how the system
reacts to them... which seems to be exactly what Peters is advocating.

I don't know how the term is used in management consulting circles. Perhaps
"systems thinking" has nothing to do with either systems or thinking, and it's
just the latest buzzword that management consultants use to carry on selling
what they always have. But if that were true, it would surely say more about
management consulting than about systems thinking.

------
jokull
GTD tip - don't make it (GTD) a hobby.

------
KentHealy
Too much planning can certainly backfire, hence this article: When planning
becomes a crutch - the woes of reaction and inaction:
<http://dontgetburnedblog.com/planning-becomes-a-crutch/>

~~~
zb
BTW every time you use the word "inciteful" I wonder if you made it up on
purpose or if you just can't spell. And that worries me because anybody who
thinks that "insightful" is spelled "inciteful" clearly doesn't have any idea
what it means, and that would imply that maybe you're just using long words
even though you don't actually know what they mean, and that doesn't make me
inclined to pay attention to the rest of it.

So if you want some free advice, I would stick to using real words unless your
neologisms can add a lot more value than they are here.

------
bluesnowmonkey
There is no specific question or thesis here about which to form an opinion.
Is he saying that planning is bad? Always? What kind of planning? It's all
vague platitudes.

------
stcredzero
In other words:

    
    
        Exploration > Planning
    

This makes sense in any area where one is blazing new territory.

------
da5e
It's a miracle. A three-way seesaw between ideas, actions and planning.

------
c00p3r
Such a bold headline.. ^_^

Everyone who at least once tried to participate in a mountain expedition
should know that planing is useless. Everything is changing each half of hour,
and what you do is adapting and correcting your assumptions on the go.

Of course you need some preparation, like getting warm clothes and stuff, but
what would you actually wear you will know only right before the moment you're
leaving the camp.

And of course, you never know when. ^_^

~~~
skowmunk
And it takes planning to ensure that you have all the different types of warm
clothing that may be required to face as many of the possible conditions on
that mountain as possible.

Of course, there are limits on how much you can take, and planning can help
determine those limits (so that you don't end preparing for the tail ends of a
distribution of possible scenarios and end up carrying a heavy burden).

There is always a give and take relationship in preparing for possible
scenarios and the resources one can afford to spend for those possibilities.

~~~
c00p3r
I'm just trying to emphasize that actual experience is much more important
than any amount of planing.

Moreover, planning if it was about top-down time-scheduling is useless,
because you cannot foresee anything.

What most programmers do - it is like a planning an expedition without any
experience using lonely-planet and internet for estimations - just a wasting
of a time.

No amount of planning can replace your own personal experience, but with a lot
of experience you don't need planing - you're just doing.

~~~
skowmunk
Not trying to be an asshole here, but love pushing logic.

I would definitely agree that the importance of experience can never be
emphasized enough. The more the better, always.

But, even if one were to over simplify this, at the least, it is a trifecta of
experience, planning and the complexity/scope of the task/goal.

If one were doing what the facebook team did at the start, a bunch of friends,
coding non stop for days on end, bringing in formal planning would be the most
idiotic thing. (but if one were to be anal about it, even that takes some ad-
hoc, seat of the pants planning - what features to have, what algorithms to
develop, blablabla)

But for the same facebook to keep growing at 500 mil users +, providing
increased features (not to mention, deciding what features to provide in the
short, mid or long term) while employing geographically distributed teams, it
is impossible to go without planning. Make note, I mention 'planning' not
'plans'.

The same goes with what a team of one is trying to accomplish, depending on
the complexity and scope of the goal with respect to that person's relative
experience.

As Eiserhower said, "plans are useless, but planning indispensable" (or
something like that). I can go on explaining why those words are so
meaningful, but that did be a monologue and I am trying to get out of that
habit :)

