Plans Are Worthless; Planning is Everything
Last week, I co-facilitated a high level Commission's Retreat that I designed along with my co-facilitator, Jon Desenberg, of the Performance Institute. We threw out the bulk of our planned design. It was brilliant.
Never mind that we spent hours upon hours in design, revision, and re-revision based on the client's ever-shifting requirements. Never mind that we worked nights and weekends to ensure that every moment of the 3.5 days of the retreat was well-planned and optimally accounted for in the highly interactive agenda.
We re-designed the whole thing at least three times during the three day retreat, on the fly.
Why?
Because it was the right thing to do. We listened to the clients attentively DURING the retreat. We were finely attuned to the situation, non-verbal nuances, reactions and interactions. We focused on their agenda, desired outcomes and energy dynamics, and adjusted accordingly.
How did it work?
Extremely well. Many of the participants, seasoned professionals with huge resumes and egos to match, thanked us heartily at the end. One said he came in highly skeptical and is leaving a converted man. Amen! The client indicated they want to engage us further in the coming year. They loved it.
So what does this mean about our pre-retreat work: was it a waste of time? I mean, after all, we threw just about all of those activities out the window.
No. As Dwight D. Eistenhower once said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." Here's why:
1. Planning forces you to ponder possibilities and entertain potential obstacles before they happen. By thinking in advance about the goals for the retreat (or class, meeting, presentation, etc.) and the current state of things you make smart decisions about what works and what doesn't, but also consider some Plan B, C, and Z approaches to have in your 'bag of tools' should you need them.
2. Planning provides you with a framework within which to flex and shift. Without this framework, we would have flailed about when the situation changed because we would not have had the structure to ground us. Knowing time frames, limitations, possibilities, and desired outcomes COLD helped us select IN certain options and select OUT others in the moment.
3. Planning gives you the confidence needed to embrace change and the uncertainty it can bring. The more time you spend planning for an event, the less unexpected changes can shake your confidence because you are more familiar with the content and context. Knowing that the changes emanated from the external context -- not from some deficiencies in us or our plans -- gave us the confidence to throw out the plans and create new, better ones. We did not encounter any insecurities and were able to stay responsive and client-focused. Our clients sensed this confidence and trusted our skills, which fed back our loop of self-assurance and calm confidence in the face of change and flux.
What have been your experiences with planning vs. plans?
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mringlein/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
TalentGrow
Reader Comments (2)
There are other relevant quotes (one that comes to mind, related to Eisenhower's is that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy")--we always need to be ready to think critically and creatively to adjust our execution to optimize the customer's experience.
Thank you for your clarity on this lesson.