A good plan is always a guarantee of success

The usefulness of plans

Plans are valuable. Without plans, we would not have reached our current level of prosperity and development. Plans are a useful tool for the effects below.

With plans, you can organize mutual coordination. That way you know everyone is building the same thing, on the same scale.
Plans help you make choices and so are options for the future that you can compare well.
Plans are crystallized strategic ingenuity. You use your acquired knowledge to increase the likelihood of success.

The nonsense of planning

But plans are also overrated. As easy as it comes off Hannibal Smith – “I love it when a plan comes together” – it is not in the real world.

Military planners say, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” In other words, plans quickly become dated. That the future unfolds exactly as the process you envisioned is very unlikely.
Plans do not absolve you of your responsibility to achieve your goal. But in an unsafe environment, people like to hide behind plans and processes. If you followed the plan, no one can blame you. Or can they?
Some people even confuse making a plan with executing it. If you have an annual plan, you have done your homework. That you don’t have time to execute it is then force majeure.
With so many different plans, you lose sight of the bigger picture. Coherence is gone and a whole pile of unfinished projects drags on.
After all, it is an illusion that you can use plans to track your progress. Plans are changeable and full of assumptions. Therefore, you cannot simply say you are 50% done when your plan is 50% implemented.

Use plans smartly

To get the most out of plans, you need a more transparent organization. In such an organization, no plans run alongside each other because the goals between them are clear and clearly prioritized. Executive teams make their own plans and have clear frameworks within which they can adjust their plans to achieve their goals.

Thanks to transparency in the organization, such a team knows who is going to be affected by changed plans. Together, you can then arrive at an optimal change. But transparency is a verb. It is hard work to create the atmosphere where it is safe to deviate from plans when necessary.

The Agile balance

So smarter planning is about hitting the balance between efficiency and effectiveness. In a bureaucratic organization, the balance tips toward efficiency. Plans there are mutual contracts. They are agreements you stick to, because changing agreements leads to chaos. Perhaps it is time to work less efficiently? In a start-up environment, the balance tips over to the other side: achieving goals takes precedence. If you just work hard enough, you will succeed. You don’t have time to make a smart plan.

You hit the balance by planning for what you can control. That’s the short-term and the things you know won’t change. For the rest, you keep a guard up. Where that balance lies for you, you can discover by playing with the level of detail in the plans.

More principles for the Agile organization?

Planning and alignment, it’s just one of the 9 areas where a modern organization hits the right balance. You can read about the other eight principles in our Manifesto: High Impact, Happy Teams. By balancing these nine principles, your organization makes the most impact with the least effort. And that makes us at Scrum Academy happy. Your team too?

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