The Hidden Danger of Excessive Planning: How Fear Masquerades as Productivity
Excessive planning isn’t a strategy—it’s a defense mechanism
Patterns
“Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car. They prescribe the steps to take and the results to expect in excruciating detail, and as in planning to launch a rocket, they are set up in such a way that even tiny errors in assumptions can lead to catastrophic outcomes.”
Perspectives
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Richard Feynman
“If you learn "indoor" techniques, you will think narrowly and forget the true Way. Thus you will have difficulty in actual encounters.”
Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
“I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.”
Pablo Picasso
Analysis: The Real Reason You’re Stuck in the ‘Build’ Phase
When Eric Ries published The Lean Startup in 2011, it quickly struck a chord. It’s been translated into over 30 languages and has sold over 1 million copies, in addition to landing on numerous bestseller lists. Why? Among other things, he managed to elucidate to a mass audience a concept that many leaders, executives and professionals know all too well from personal experience: that we all tend to engage in excessive planning with the aim of producing better outcomes, and that the same excessive planning often tends to result in poorer outcomes. Collectively, we seem to take great comfort in planning, organizing and forecasting, despite the obvious limitations of such methods in uncertain and rapidly changing environments.
This behavior extends to our private lives as well. Most new ventures in life would benefit from the “Build-Measure-Learn” framework that Ries introduces. The basic concept is that when launching something new, the most efficient approach is to create the first draft as quickly as possible and then get it out into the market so that you can begin collecting data. This real-world data is infinitely more helpful than anything you could have thought up through speculation or forecasting, and it then allows you to iterate and update your model. This ensures that you’re creating something that is both useful and well-designed for it’s intended purpose, whatever that may be. Not surprisingly, most people get stuck in the “Build” phase. They spend a great deal of time and energy building and planning, well before they even have confirmation that what they’re building is needed or effective. It’s a pervasive behavioral pattern, in the workplace and in life.
It’s easy to get stuck in the building phase, and it serves a convenient purpose—
it protects us from critical feedback.
Insight: The Allure of Overplanning—It Keeps Us Safe
How do we practice, prepare and seek excellence? For many of us, our efforts are not as honest and direct as we would hope them to be. The problem is that we’re often not aware of this fact. We delude ourselves. We construct detailed plans and convoluted systems, all with the superficial intention of executing our plans successfully. If you look beneath surface, something doesn’t quite add up. Our detailed planning and preparatory efforts are often overdone.
As Ries highlights above, in the corporate world many projects are planned with an excruciating amount of detail. Because the plans themselves are so detailed, their expected results are also forecasted with a similar level of detail. The problem is that when future plans are constructed with an ever-increasing amount of detail, their successful execution becomes more and more dependent on the accuracy of the underlying assumptions. This usually results in less than ideal outcomes, for obvious reasons.
So why does this occur? Why do we prefer planning over execution? It’s a pervasive pattern, and it occurs not only with teams and organizations but at the level of the individual as well. The simple but counterintuitive answer is that planning is easy. It may involve long hours of rote busywork, but there is a trade-off. There are psychological benefits. Planning is easy because it keeps us safe.
Planning and preparation serve to protect the ego, individually and collectively. As long as a new project or initiative remains in the planning stage, it’s not real yet. This allows you to avoid confronting uncomfortable data and inconvenient feedback. Once you go live, your forced to confront reality. With that comes the terrifying possibility that you may be wrong, or that your idea is simply not that good. Bear in mind that future plans have standalone value. They inspire, motivate and generate enthusiasm. We’re incentivized to protect them.
Future plans are a source of hope.
As long as they remain untested, they’re able to provide comfort and solace when the reality of the present moment doesn’t meet our expectations.
Mastery: Create Systems to Protect Against Biases
How do we move beyond the allure of excess planning? It’s essentially a two-step process:
Recognize that the fears driving this tendency are misguided and built upon faulty assumptions.
Create a system that protects against our biases and forces us to generate movement more quickly than we would normally prefer.
In terms of the underlying fears driving our behavior: many of us are hesitant to put our ideas to market because we’re afraid that they won’t work. This is reasonable, and probably true most of the time. Most first drafts aren’t that good. This isn’t necessarily bad news. The problem is with the conclusion that we draw. For many of us, it is: “I was wrong. My idea was not good.” Thoughts like this are very common, but that doesn’t lend them any legitimacy. They’re an example of “all or nothing” thinking, a classic cognitive distortion. The next time you find yourself entertaining such thoughts, remember: there are very few moments in life when we can make such definitive statements with unequivocal certainty.
The conclusion to be drawn is not “my idea is not good”, it is: “the current version of my idea is not good in one or more ways, and it can now be updated and corrected based on the feedback I’ve received.”
In terms of the system: the framework that Ries has developed is well-designed and easy to implement. It corrects for our inherent biases by allowing teams and individuals to lean into the structure and trust in the process, despite their discomfort.
The basic framework that Ries lays out contains two key concepts:
Build-Measure-Learn (B-M-L) and Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
These concepts are straightforward and self-explanatory. They’re meant to be put into practice. Ponder over them too much and you’ll be engaging in the same type of behavior we’re trying to avoid. The core process:
Acknowledge the root cause of your hesitancy. Rather than suppress your fear, embrace it. Expect that your first draft will need corrections, and be okay with this. This is liberating.
Quickly build a minimum viable product, service or initiative.
Put it into practice and get in the game.
Collect your data and iterate as you go.
This process can be used for any new initiative, from building a startup to creating a new fitness routine. Regardless of the context—keep it simple, and recognize when you’re deceiving yourself.