Conventional wisdom points us to the concept of having a plan A and a plan B. I’m a strong believer not just in operating a two-track approach but also in “a good plan today beats a perfect plan tomorrow”.
Let’s kick off with an example from my life; it’s instructive on a couple of levels but works well to deliver something concrete to illustrate my point.
On this assignment, my job title was “Special Projects Manager.” I’d been given this title and role to slot into an internet travel business so as not to disrupt the current management structure but recognising that someone needed to “get things done” outside of business as usual.
One of my projects was to redesign the entire website and application ahead of the next fund raise. Timing was of critical importance; a delay would have wide-reaching impacts. It wasn’t a small job; the application was two or so years old and had a large team working on it.
Redesigning a website whilst it’s still being worked on is a rolling wheel change. You can’t apply the handbrake and wait for a few months whilst everything is repainted.
I’d employed a third-party design agency in Geneva to come up with the new design language and execute the respray.
At the same time, the smaller but somewhat stretched internal design team had also been tasked with coming up with a sparkling new revision.
I had my plan A, and my plan B. It’s not always you have the financial resources to do this, but remember, timing was everything here, so the budget afforded this luxury.
Both teams had come up with something interesting, but ultimately, the internal team’s designs and approach won out and were implemented. The familiarity of context, purpose and audience allowed them the edge; they had created an evolution of the design, and the third-party agency had created a revolution.
The internal team had been my plan B, a fallback. Plan A looked good; we’d done a root and branch refresh of everything, taken a fresh look at what else was out there, and developed some great workshopped concepts. You wouldn’t have been unhappy with their work. However, the internal team, despite having much fewer resources, had come up with something cleaner and smarter.
I met my deadline, paused plan A before it completed (saving a few beer tokens) and hugged our design team in a manly way.
This brings me to the other topic, developing a good versus perfect plan; there’s a fine line between planning and attempting to plan away all the things reality will inevitably throw at you. Execution often disrupts plans because there’s no hermetically sealed clean room for getting things done in both business and our personal lives. Change happens, understanding grows, and other tasks and priorities nose their way into view. You’ve been there; life happens.
Trying to perfect a plan, knowing even as you construct it, things are changing around you, means you have to have a good sense of what represents “enough”.
The measure of Enough is going to hinge on the risks/importance (for example, planning a nuclear power station has a very different “enough” compared to planning the ideal starter for a dinner party). The second dimension is effort/duration, how long into the horizon will the project run and the amount of money/resources being deployed.
The cone of uncertainty is a good concept to latch onto here. Imagine a cone, with the widest part closest and the smallest point furthest away. At the beginning, the planning stage, the cone is wide, and there’s lots of uncertainty (see reality happens, as above); as you progress in the project, understanding and risks become clearer and therefore, uncertainty diminishes.
Recognising this fact, you can consider how much planning is enough and anticipate that you will need to check back in consistently to vary the plan.
How do these two things, my two-track approach and a good plan hang together? If we recognise that planning is never going to be perfect, we can summarise that having two plans, perhaps with varying degrees of ambition, might be a good mitigation strategy if things start to go horribly wrong or if the outcome you need to reach changes based on events, you are increasing your chance of success.
There are lots of other Plan A, Plan B examples; what happens if I don’t get the promotion I’m going for? What is my Plan B if the house I want to buy gets taken by someone else? You can add whatever context you like here, but another takeaway from today's blog should be that thinking around a problem looking at different outcomes, prepares you in advance.
Thank you, friends, for making it all the way down to the bottom of this blog. Plan B might have been to give up early on and go read some obscure fact, having taxed your brain enough for one day (I recommend googling, how long does grass live for, because no one really seems to know the answer to that if you ask them). See you on the next outing, which I had a great idea for yesterday but then appear to have totally forgotten today.