Planning is overrated. The best performers seesaw between ideas and actions.

http://www.tompeters.com/dispatches/009986.php

by l0stman • 16 years ago

58 34 16 years ago

tompeters.com

jokull• 16 years ago

GTD tip - don't make it (GTD) a hobby.

wccrawford• 16 years ago

As usual, life is not black and white, it is grey. The best performance can be obtained by:

Idea(s) Plan(s) Action(s)

Of course, the trick is to know when to switch from one to the other. Generally, I like to take an idea (or ideas) and think about them for a while. When I feel vaguely comfortable that there are no obvious roadblocks, start planning. When I'm vaguely comfortable there are no subtle roadblocks, it's time for action. If you hit a roadblock, it's back to the ideas phase.

This strategy keeps you moving forward, bring fresh information quickly, and avoids most roadblocks before they waste any time.

Depending on the scope of the idea, the planning could be anywhere from minutes to days. Scope and complexity also change whether the planning happens purely in my head, or requires some typing to get everything clear.

Luckily, life usually gives us ideas while we're working on something else, so there's time to think about an idea for a while before you even have time to take action, which gives some planning time.

skowmunk3• 16 years ago

I agree. It is never black and white, and the applicability of any rule or principal also depends on the context.

A small company cannot afford to do planning like that of a billion dollar company.

A billion dollar company cannot afford to plan like a small company (that is, not do much of planning). And for both, the folly always is in waiting for completing the perfect plan, before acting, because there is nothing such as the perfect plan.

Note: 'Afford' as not just in money terms, but the risk of taking the extra time to plan.

da5e4• 16 years ago

I think this comment itself would make a great HN front page item.

The knowledge that we get ideas while doing is important.

akadien• 16 years ago

Planning for planning's sake is not the same as planning to act. Big organizations typically fail to see the difference because the price of failure is too high for them compared to smaller, more nimble orgs.

simonsquiff• 16 years ago

"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." Eisenhower - one of my favourite quotes that sums this up well.

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

It's similar to practicing scales or intervals on the piano. You'll rarely have to play those sequence of notes just like that, but the practice still prepares you for other actions.

c00p3r2• 16 years ago

Such a bold headline.. ^_^

Everyone who at least once tried to participate in a mountain expedition should know that planing is useless. Everything is changing each half of hour, and what you do is adapting and correcting your assumptions on the go.

Of course you need some preparation, like getting warm clothes and stuff, but what would you actually wear you will know only right before the moment you're leaving the camp.

And of course, you never know when. ^_^

skowmunk3• 16 years ago

And it takes planning to ensure that you have all the different types of warm clothing that may be required to face as many of the possible conditions on that mountain as possible.

Of course, there are limits on how much you can take, and planning can help determine those limits (so that you don't end preparing for the tail ends of a distribution of possible scenarios and end up carrying a heavy burden).

There is always a give and take relationship in preparing for possible scenarios and the resources one can afford to spend for those possibilities.

c00p3r2• 16 years ago

I'm just trying to emphasize that actual experience is much more important than any amount of planing.

Moreover, planning if it was about top-down time-scheduling is useless, because you cannot foresee anything.

What most programmers do - it is like a planning an expedition without any experience using lonely-planet and internet for estimations - just a wasting of a time.

No amount of planning can replace your own personal experience, but with a lot of experience you don't need planing - you're just doing.

da5e4• 16 years ago

Don't you have to plan in order to prepare? And part of planning is using the prior knowledge of people who have experienced things that empower them to plan better.

edw5192• 16 years ago

The problem I had was that Clinton's principal associate is Ira Magaziner, the same "intellectual" who was the schemer-in-chief behind "Hillary care" in 1993.

The problem I have is that Tom Peters is the same "intellectual" who continues to say less with more words that any other "business guru" on the lecture circuit.

Funny how often over the years he has been wrong with his McKinsey-like advice while the world changed under his feet.

Funnier is that the guy who skims the surface of everything, never digging down below one level is telling us hackers to act without realizing that this is one audience you can't bullshit.

Examples of Peters' charlatanism are everywhere. Just a few:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/53/peters.html

http://www.sathnam.com/Features/31/tom-peters

http://www.amazon.com/Witch-Doctors-Making-Sense-Management/...

studer• 16 years ago

Ok, I can see why it may be fun to counter something that partially reads like a personal attack on Magaziner with something that's definitely a personal attack on Peters (insert discussion about HN as a forum for spectator sports here), but do you also disagree with the argument about planning vs. doing that he's actually making?

cal5k3• 16 years ago

It's called an ad hominem argument, and it's one of the many well-known logical fallacies. For more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

cal5k3• 16 years ago

It's odd, because I don't get the same sentiment from reading the two articles you've cited (I haven't read the book).

Essentially, you're upset that the man's predictions have often been wrong. Big whup. Show me one billionaire or nobel prize-winning scientist who hasn't been wrong hundreds of times and I'll show you a liar.

What you should get out of Tom Peters' manic style is, if anything, that you should always question business as usual because shit is going to keep changing. That's it. If you're taking his (or anyone else's) advice as a prescription for how you should think, act, or feel - you're a fool. Advice should merely serve as fodder for thinking, for shocking us out of doing things just because we've always done them that way.

If you form your own opinions, there's no need to go foamy at the mouth when someone else's turn out to be wrong.

edw5192• 16 years ago

If you form your own opinions, there's no need to go foamy at the mouth when someone else's turn out to be wrong.

Maybe not.

But then again, this is a guy who has built an entire career (and industry, in fact) on exactly the opposite of what most of us practice here at hn.

While we build, he talks.

While we test, he guesses.

While we ask, he tells.

When we're right, we deliver value, When he's right, people just say, "Of course."

When we're wrong, shit stops working. When he's wrong, the PHBs still keep writing him checks.

When the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, someone should say so. Especially here.

stcredzero• 16 years ago

In other words:

    Exploration > Planning

This makes sense in any area where one is blazing new territory.

bmr• 16 years ago

The fact that many "performers" are somewhat unfocused doesn't mean that planning is overrated. These people would likely do even better with a little more discipline.

It just that big successes more often come from people with lots of ideas and lots of experimentation as opposed to people who pick relatively unambitious careers and rotely execute day after day.

KentHealy• 16 years ago

Too much planning can certainly backfire, hence this article: When planning becomes a crutch - the woes of reaction and inaction: http://dontgetburnedblog.com/planning-becomes-a-crutch/

zb2• 16 years ago

BTW every time you use the word "inciteful" I wonder if you made it up on purpose or if you just can't spell. And that worries me because anybody who thinks that "insightful" is spelled "inciteful" clearly doesn't have any idea what it means, and that would imply that maybe you're just using long words even though you don't actually know what they mean, and that doesn't make me inclined to pay attention to the rest of it.

So if you want some free advice, I would stick to using real words unless your neologisms can add a lot more value than they are here.

zb2• 16 years ago

I don't understand where systems thinking comes in to this. Because anybody who has thought at all about systems will realise they the are complex and hard to predict (because we can't know everything about the system), and therefore that the way forward is to make small changes and see how the system reacts to them... which seems to be exactly what Peters is advocating.

I don't know how the term is used in management consulting circles. Perhaps "systems thinking" has nothing to do with either systems or thinking, and it's just the latest buzzword that management consultants use to carry on selling what they always have. But if that were true, it would surely say more about management consulting than about systems thinking.

da5e4• 16 years ago

This is a fecund article as evidenced by the excellent comments here it has sparked.

My half-serious takeaways are: Peters mistakes overplanning and over-complexifying for systems thinking.

Some things really are complex. They stretch the boundaries of Einstein's idea that things should be as simple as possible but no simpler.

Anyone who thinks rapid prototyping is "play" hasn't been in a high-intensity production environment.

Peters is a popularizer but he sure can get the mental blood flowing.

You can't define a minimum viable product with which to start prototyping without some good planning/thought.

Perhaps to belabor the analogy, part of getting ready to fire is some amount of aiming.

The rap (deserved or not) on Microsoft is that it does the worst of both overplanning and then releasing products (prototypes?) that the customers have to "test". Slow-prototyping?

I like Bloomberg's quote, "We act from day one..."

The oil hunting analogy shows Peters' basic idea flaw because in order to drill test wells you have to read maps and study. Plus lack of planning can get very expensive in that field.

Was it Beckett who said, "Fail better." Even that requires planning along with the experience.

Attributing the loss of the House to "Hillary care" is solidly in the "dumb-simplifier" category.

Good enough depends on very intelligent implementation and feedback. Going off half-cocked is fine if the foreplay is effective. :-)

There is a difference in writing in which all your rapid prototyping is done in your drafts than in putting out an under-developed product. Although there are some experiments with crowd-sourcing writing too.

I liked this submariner catch-phrase, "Water in the people tank."

One comment said: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." John Lennon My thought was, "So is death."

Ah lazy Sunday mornings.

da5e4• 16 years ago

It's a miracle. A three-way seesaw between ideas, actions and planning.

bluesnowmonkey• 16 years ago

There is no specific question or thesis here about which to form an opinion. Is he saying that planning is bad? Always? What kind of planning? It's all vague platitudes.

Planning is overrated. The best performers seesaw between ideas and actions.

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