Flawless Planning in a Nutshell

Based on “Flawless Planning: The art and science of planning anything” | 2023 Jack Ricchiuto.

The Open Source Flawless Planning model evolved over the past 30 years from research and practice in creativity, neurolinguistics, and the power of new questions. It applies to any and every planning context from the smallest personal to the largest collective scales. It makes sense and works every time. Having a plan is a good idea. Having a flawless plan is an even better idea.

The model features four elements: Plan mapping, Scenario mapping, Scenario composing, and Question composing. They make it possible for us to be our best in planning anything.

In flawless planning, no one has to have all the answers. No one has to pretend to predict the future. No one has to be the smartest person in the room. Instead, it’s all about working from the right questions at the right time, turning uncertainties into assets, and being smarter together.

Instead of working from the flaws of assumptions, we work flawlessly from new questions that are inspiring, engaging, and productive. New questions have the unique, uncanny power that allows us to be our best in any situation. They give us access to our unlimited inner resources. They reveal new options of ideas, questions, and opportunities.

It’s fascinating that just shifting our planning model could make such a profound difference.

Simple

The idea of flawless planning is simple. There is one flaw in flawed planning: working from assumptions. The radical distinction in flawless planning is that we work instead from questions.

Flawless planning requires less effort than flawed planning because nothing wastes more time and energy than assumption-based planning. If we’re good at flawed planning, it’s because we learned from people skilled in it and have been practicing it long enough to get fairly good at it.

The first thing to know about flawless planning is that we already have the requisite abilities. These are the abilities of imagining, wondering, remembering, and discovering. Learning the model means learning how to engage these at the right time in the process.

It might be impossible to know how many life forms there have been on this planet over the past 3+ billion years. What we do know is that each new variety of life forms was a new combination of the same four basic elements: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. This is what imagining, wondering, remembering, and discovering are in the flawless planning process. They become the essence of unlimited varieties of planning.

The simple power of the model is that we work from four principles: We always have a plan; A plan is one scenario; The future we have is the future we imagine; and Our best future is a wonderful future. Each principle has a corresponding practice: Plan mapping, Scenario mapping, Scenario composing, and Question composing.

The model works with planning alone we well as with any number of others — in any planning context. Imagine having a single planning model for any time you do any kind of planning. Flawless planning is this model.

Plan Mapping: We always have a plan

We define a plan as what we imagine feeling and doing in any situation based on what we’re assuming and wondering at the time. In any situation we experience or anticipate, we always have a plan. Following detailed lists is a plan. Winging it is a plan.

Our brains are wired to run millions of simulations each second to compose our moment to moment experience of what we know, feel, and do. We’re wired to imagine the future.

The practice here is to take any situation and reflect on the question: What’s our plan? We notice what comes up. That’s our plan‒at least, so far.

One way to get a sense of our plan is to describe what we’re imagining feeling, doing, assuming, and wondering.

Being clear we have a plan has the power to engage our sense of being at cause rather than at effect in our experience. Having a sense of agency is a core requirement for composing our best possible future. The instant we acknowledge we have a plan is the instant we have taken the radical responsibility for composing our future.

Scenario Mapping: A plan is one scenario

In whatever shape it’s in, our plan for any situation is one scenario of many possible scenarios. We do our worst planning assuming that the only scenario we do imagine is the only scenario we could or should imagine.

Scenarios are perspectives, not predictions. Perspectives reveal planning options. New options are new ideas, questions, and opportunities. The more scenarios we plan, the more options we have access to.

The practice here is to think of different favorable and unfavorable scenarios in our planning situation. A scenario is one version of a situation, one way we could imagine it going. Favorable scenarios are those we would look forward to; unfavorable are those we would not look forward to.

Then we place them in any of four quadrants made from two intersecting continuums of preference and feasibility. Along the preference continuum are favorable to unfavorable scenarios. On the feasibility continuum are likely to unlikely scenarios. This gives us the four quadrants of favorable-likely, favorable-unlikely, unfavorable-likely, and unfavorable-unlikely.

This is building a scenario landscape map. From here, we decide which scenarios to plan first or next. We can decide to plan for any scenarios we want. This implies also having the option to have scenarios we don’t plan. The future we compose is entirely our choice.

Scenario Composing: The future we have is the future we imagine

We don’t have a future other than the future we imagine in our planning. When we imagine a favorable best scenario, it’s because we’re composing this scenario with words, images, or both. It only exists because we compose it, in the way we compose it. It’s the same when we imagine an unfavorable worst scenario.

These imagined scenarios don’t live in some distant “future.” We create them in the present, here and now. They do not live outside our creative imaginations.

The practice here is composing our best for any scenario by accessing our unlimited inner resources. These are our aspirations, inspirations, and abilities.

Aspirations are what matters to us and why in a specific scenario. When we plan our week or a project, our aspirations are what matters to us in this week or this project. We create a deeper appreciation for what matters to us by also describing why these things matter to us.

Inspirations are what we visualize that we would like to feel and do, given what happens in the scenario. We visualize feeling what we want to feel and doing what we want to do with as many details as we can. We can visualize using our mind’s eye, in words, or both.

Abilities are the skills we already have that would make possible what we visualize feeling and doing in a scenario. We decide which skills we have and, as vividly as possible, recall times in our lives when we engaged these skills. The more times we recall, and the more details we use to visualize these times, the better.

For each scenario we want to plan, we describe our aspirations. We visualize our inspirations. We name our abilities and visualize times in our lives we engaged these. This makes them optimally accessible for any scenario.

The more we access these inner resources, the easier it becomes to be our best in any favorable or unfavorable scenario. Being our best is feeling and doing our best. Imagining our best primes our mind to be our best — in any scenario.

Question composing: Our best future is a wonderful future

Wonder is curiosity, having new questions. A flawless plan is a plan of what questions we will answer along the way to realizing our aspirations and inspirations by engaging our abilities. It is a literally wonder-full model.

The power of the process is turning planning uncertainties into new questions. Our assumptions are one of the basic forms of uncertainties. The opposite of assuming is finding out — through conversations, research, and experiments.

Each answered question reveals the next questions to answer in the planning process‒the way that, in mountain climbing, each move reveals the next moves in the direction of our aspirations and inspirations.

In flawless planning, we build and answer questions to learn our way into being our best in any scenario. It is all about question-learning.

There are three basic kinds of questions we build and answer in flawless planning: results questions, situation questions, and action questions.

Results questions are about what we want to see possible and what we will actually see happen. Situation questions are about further understanding the situation we’re planning. We build results and situation questions in the forms of who, what, when, where, how, and why. Action questions are about what we do to answer each of our answerable questions. We builld action questions in the forms of could we, should we, how could we, what if we, and will we.

As we build our questions, we estimate when it would be good to answer them, leaving this estimates adaptable as we go. Timing is everything. One question, action, and answer at a time, we learn our way into making the best scenario possible.

While working from assumptions limits access to new options of ideas, questions, and opportunities, working from questions expands this access. The more options we have in any planning process, the easier and better it is. When our planning is question-based, composing our future is literally wonder-full.

The nutshell

So, here’s the entire flawless planning model.

We describe what our plan is for any situation. We identify related scenario versions of the situation. We compose each scenario by accessing our inner resources. We form and answer questions that will guide us in learning our way into the best results possible. We keep refreshing everything as we go because everything we learn will shift our perspectives.

There’s no way to do it wrong because, in direct contrast to flawed planning, it doesn’t require any kinds of prediction or following a plan. It flourishes on our being our imperfect best.

Planning is about answering the right questions at the right time, not doing what our predictions assume. We don’t follow a plan; we compose and adapt it all along the way based on the continuous flow of questions and learning that unfolds.

The model gives us a unique way of planning that works in any scenario‒from simple to complex, planning alone or together. The model works with one person, a small group, or with hundreds of people‒even within networks or communities of thousands. You might even find it life changing.

For more about Flawless Planning, visit FlawlessPlanning.org. The Flawless Planning model is an open source model under the Creative Commons license: Flawless Planning © 2023 by Jack Ricchiuto is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Join us for the online Flawless Planning Webinars on 1.24.24 and 1.31.24.