A series of events this week made me think about how we make plans. It all began when I started my lecture on Tuesday about marketing planning. One student wanted to know if there was a “right way” to do planning. I said that there was definitely a wrong way to plan. All they had to do was read what the UK Transport Secretary had been saying about the plans for our national embarrassment, HS2.
Another idea about planning occurred after the lecture when I met one of the university’s volunteers who teaches our overseas students how to improve their English. She told me that she had recently celebrated her 90th birthday and that she had no intention of giving up her voluntary teaching. She said she planned to continue teaching right up to her 100th birthday.
What is even more stunning about this wonderful but simple plan is that she will achieve that milestone within a decade, well before the ill-fated HS2 railway line carries a single passenger. If you are not aware, HS2 is Britain’s answer to the French TGV high-speed trains. HS2 was announced in 2009 and will not carry passengers until the mid-2030s, with the full system not being ready until 2043. Yes, that’s 34 years in the making. In France, the TGV line from Paris to Lyon took roughly 7 years to build.
This relates directly to what I discussed in my lecture, which was the concept of “The Planning Fallacy”. This happens when we believe our preferred version of the future. Even though we know that a project is likely to take a certain amount of time, we convince ourselves that we know better and that we can pull it off in record time. We underestimate the time taken to complete the required tasks. When the inevitable happens, and we fail to meet the deadline, we blame the plan and so create another plan. We get sucked into the notion that because we have a plan, all will be well. This is precisely what has happened with the HS2 project. The politicians think it must be OK simply because they have a plan. Then, when it is not all right, they just create another plan, believing that the new one will solve the issue. And so on it goes.
Every place I have worked has produced plans that looked convincing on paper but struggled once reality intervened. Yet, the old adage that if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail can be heard in offices up and down the land. The result is that there are plenty of plans. The problem is that many of these plans are fallacies. They are based on the optimism bias. Humans tend to be more optimistic about what will happen in the future. We are biased towards positivity in our plans.
That’s a problem in the workplace, as it doesn’t allow for factors that can interrupt our plans in ways we hadn’t predicted. Achieving our plans requires a complex interplay of psychological factors, including attentional control, memory, and decision-making. With complex plans, it is easy for people to lose attention, to forget particular aspects and make poor decisions. The result of all that is that the plan fails.
This is also related to the fact that many plans in business are too complex and rigid. For a major project like HS2, planners argue that every little detail needs to be planned for. The result is that the plan is cognitively complex, and humans cannot follow it easily. That leads planners to make even more detailed, specific, and small plans that can be followed, which merely delays the project.
The answer to this is to plan as you go. Rather than having a big, detailed plan, it is better to start with an outline plan and then work out what to do as you go along. This is a nimble and agile process that Harvard Business Review recommends for salespeople, for instance.
But think of it like using a SatNav. Nowadays, you enter your destination into the software, and it plans your route. You then stick to that plan, not cognitively engaging with it, but merely following its directions. Then you find yourself in a traffic jam that the SatNav did not predict. Or extensive roadworks have closed roads that the software did not know about. Your plans are scuppered.
But in those “olden days” before SatNavs, we knew roughly where to go or had a printed map as a guide. However, we adapted that plan as we went along, depending on each new circumstance we encountered. That’s the essence of agile planning: changing things depending on what we find along the way, rather than clinging to a complex plan simply because it exists. The danger is not in having a plan. The danger is falling in love with it. Once we do that, we enter the world of the planning fallacy, where the future looks neat, predictable and manageable, until reality turns up and proves otherwise.
