The planning fallacy: “

We blame bureaucracy for being wasteful and taking too long when things like the Denver International Airport or Boston’s Big Dig arrive years overdue and billions over budget. But it’s not just huge organizations and the government that mess up planning. Everyone does. It’s the ‘planning fallacy.’ We think we can plan, but we can’t.

Studies show it doesn’t matter whether you ask people for their realistic best guess or a hoped-for best case scenario. Either way, they give you the best case scenario. It’s true on a big scale and it’s true on a small scale too.

While I don’t agree w/all of the article, I do think it’s important to keep in the back of one’s mind that plans themselves have less value than a well oiled “planning process”, with feedback loops matched to the stakeholder or responsible party structure that should be clear at the beginning of every significant project. I believe one of the great strategists from WWII said “plans are useless, planning is priceless” (Eisenhower or Churchill?).

It’s also worth pointing out that while 37Signals regularly rants against planning up front, they do start w/a kernel of a direction, and document/communicate quite efficiently all along the way. So maybe rather than “don’t plan”, they should say “start with a simple idea, and document and communicate along the way”.

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)