Not really up to 37 Signals' standard. It seems they've confused a detailed, rigid bible of a plan with being the only way to direct yourself. I think they're doing this on purpose though.
As has been said, a plan is a statement of intent. It attempts to anticipate what it can in an attempt to make choices easier when you are "in action". You are doing it wrong both if you have no intent at all and if you attempt to account for every conceivable scenario; if you do that, you never achieve your intent ~ duh!.
Here is my plan to rent a movie this weekend:
1. My objective is to secure a movie on DVD and watch it Friday night with my wife, generally enjoying the night. (See - a goal, a method and a deadline.)
2. I intend to do this by getting into my car and driving to the video store. (This is a general statement of action. I don't bother anticipating whether there is a roadblock on my street, or whether my car will start or not. That would be over-planning, and as 37S suggests, stupid.) There will most likely be things that will need to be adjusted, some big, some small.
3. Assuming the original objective remains viable, I'll rent the dvd and return home. (Note here that I am not aimlessly evaluating video stores, romping off to best buy to upgrade to blueray, or stopping at starbucks for a latte on my way to get the movie. The plan allows me to frame the actions within the realm of achieving the objectives! It helps me to make decisions. I have assumed that the objective is valid for whatever reason. Your plan helps you test that assumption, nothing more, nothing less.
Edit: Adding number 4: If, while carrying out my plan I find out that the video store is on fire, or that my wife would rather go to the theatre instead of renting, I adapt to the changing reality. I do not stubbornly insist that I follow my predefined plan. I incorporate the new variables into it. In certain cases, this does in fact mean changing the objective. However, I reassess the situation and re-plan from there.
Not having any plan is about as dumb as planning to the nth degree, IMO. Even worse, I think 37S understands this perfectly.
* 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.
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.
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.)
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.
Entirely depends what your planning. I've only written one 5 year plan admittedly but it was 4 pages long - and will guideline the project for that time.
We've never been a big fan of "splitting things up" (I know others are) because it tends to over complicate matters :)
Examples - they should be obvious. 5 years isnt a great long time in some industries (Operating systems perhaps, Chip manufacturing etc etc.). Our example is case management software - it's a good 5 year plan, Im sure it will work with little modification (18 months in things are going nicely).
So, how many plans at the beginning of 2008 had recession in mind? My guess that no one was that "ignorant" and those who were were fired at the spot.
So much consideration.
I'm afraid I don't see the point of this (very brief) blog post. A good "plan" is not simply a wild ass guess at how the future will unfold. It also covers, directly or indirectly, the past (industry trends, experience of the participants etc) and the present (competitive landscape, financial and other assets etc). Even when addressing the future, a good plan will be informed by envisioning a diverse range of possibilities that may or may not unfold.
And of course, a plan is not really a roadmap so much as it is a way of marshalling resources (money, courage, etc) to begin a journey into the unknown.
Well, what we do know is that a plan is based on predicates. For x to occur, y must also occur. The trouble is that in the future, certain things just cannot happen; that is when we need to become agile. We must adjust our planning to correlate with our current surroundings - essentially you cannot force things that just won't happen and if you do the result is an unrealistic forecast.
With that being said, you must know where you want to go - but we cannot define how we are going to get there. Because in the end, it`s not particularly important how we got there, just that we get there.
I think that focusing on the plan vs. guess argument is missing the point of the blog post. The argument they are making, at least to me, seems rather to be about avoiding the all-too-common analysis paralysis.
Like they write in the post, if you are spending all your time worrying about whether your plan is perfect or not, you aren't going to get to the point of actually _doing_ anything. If you find yourself in that situation, taking a step back and realizing that many times a plan is nothing more than a guess could remove that barrier to productivity.
If you're making predictions about what other people are going to do, call it a guess. If you're making predictions about what you are going to do, it should be a plan.
Guesses have to do with probabilities, plans with intentions. So, no real connection. I've never seen a good blog post at 37signals, but this is the dumbest so far.
37Signals seems to me like the edgy anti-conformist artsy kid who tries to be creative by doing the opposite of what is usually done. That or they try to be uselessly introspective, like the plaques in front of the majority of the meaningless metal "sculptures" you find in cities.
As has been said, a plan is a statement of intent. It attempts to anticipate what it can in an attempt to make choices easier when you are "in action". You are doing it wrong both if you have no intent at all and if you attempt to account for every conceivable scenario; if you do that, you never achieve your intent ~ duh!.
Here is my plan to rent a movie this weekend:
1. My objective is to secure a movie on DVD and watch it Friday night with my wife, generally enjoying the night. (See - a goal, a method and a deadline.)
2. I intend to do this by getting into my car and driving to the video store. (This is a general statement of action. I don't bother anticipating whether there is a roadblock on my street, or whether my car will start or not. That would be over-planning, and as 37S suggests, stupid.) There will most likely be things that will need to be adjusted, some big, some small.
3. Assuming the original objective remains viable, I'll rent the dvd and return home. (Note here that I am not aimlessly evaluating video stores, romping off to best buy to upgrade to blueray, or stopping at starbucks for a latte on my way to get the movie. The plan allows me to frame the actions within the realm of achieving the objectives! It helps me to make decisions. I have assumed that the objective is valid for whatever reason. Your plan helps you test that assumption, nothing more, nothing less.
Edit: Adding number 4: If, while carrying out my plan I find out that the video store is on fire, or that my wife would rather go to the theatre instead of renting, I adapt to the changing reality. I do not stubbornly insist that I follow my predefined plan. I incorporate the new variables into it. In certain cases, this does in fact mean changing the objective. However, I reassess the situation and re-plan from there.
Not having any plan is about as dumb as planning to the nth degree, IMO. Even worse, I think 37S understands this perfectly.