The (One) Reason Plan Implementations Fail
Well, the plan looked good on paper. To some people. Others of us had doubts, some unexpressed — and some unfortunately expressed and exiled into the land of unwelcome questions. The absurd superstition is that an “approved” plan has the magical power to make our questions irrelevant.
The plan went forward anyway and now we’re pushing the meatballs up the hill in the unenviable implementation of an unfollowable plan. As usual, life presents us with unpredictable uncertainties through plan implementation. Because that’s what life does. Uncertainty is one of its constants and no plan has the power to change this.
The distinctions between planning, plans, and plan implementations are interesting. The implication is that planning causes plans and plan implementations. In the language of lead and lag indicators, planning is the lead indicator to the lag indicators of plans and plan implementations.
The idea of plan implementation as “following” a plan is interesting. It implies that plans are the termination points of planning. If we define planning as turning uncertainties into results, learning, and new questions, implementation without planning would be a bit bizarre. Trying to shut down the cantankerous infidels doesn’t exactly make us smarter together.
If we don’t do planning during implementation, what are we doing with the continuous evolutions of unpredictable uncertainties? If we’re doing flawed planning, we simply work from our assumptions‒those from our plans or new ones that we didn’t predict in planning. We use our assumptions to essentially ignore our uncertainties.
In flawless planning, we don’t ignore implementation uncertainties because we work from zero assumptions. We translate each emerging uncertainty into new questions, actions, and outcomes.
We also don’t get tripped up by scenarios we didn’t plan for because we identify and work on multiple scenarios from the beginning. We don’t assume there is only one possible version of a situation.
We make implementation easier because we’re working from definitions of what it means to be our best in the scenarios we’re working on. We don’t assume that our predictions have the power to make implementation successful. Without the compass of our best, it’s easy to get lost, stuck, or distracted in plan implementation.
It is a misleading narrative that plan implementations fail because there is something wrong with us or with our situation. There is nothing wrong with our talents. There is nothing wrong with our time, resource, and influence constraints.
Plan implementations fail because our planning model is flawed. If we instead prefer successful implementation, all we need to do is make planning flawless and ongoing.
For more about the open source Flawless Planning model, visit FlawlessPlanning.org
