The Hidden Power of Planning

In fact, the most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.

Given a capable and intelligent person or group of people, errors rarely originate in the execution of a plan, though the plan itself may fail. Instead, errors occur in the principles underlying the development of the plan. Therefore, it's important to base a plan or a framework on the correct principles.

One shift that can help us all is to change our minds about planning. Like search, planning is a literacy that’s not taught in school, and yet it’s a key to success in life and work. We plan events, trips, families, sites, systems, companies, and cities. We do it all the time but make the same mistakes. First, we procrastinate. We fear complexity,

The inaccuracy of plans doesn’t make planning worthless. Plans aren’t useful because they help you predict with better accuracy—they’re useful because the act of creating the plan helps you understand requirements, dependencies, and risks more thoroughly than when you started. In the immortal words of Dwight D. Eisenhower: “No battle was ever won a

planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities towards other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, ‘a plan is jus