“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
”Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”
When you’re surrounded by uncertainty, rituals like project planning or resource planning may feel pointless. And it may not matter whether the ambiguity around you is caused by a legitimately unpredictable environment driven by financial, political, or regulatory upheaval or whether it’s caused by mismanagement and senior leadership who are easily distracted by shiny objects. Either way, you’re responsible to deliver value, and the rules keep changing.
But waiting to plan until you find clarity is a mistake. So is abandoning the discipline of planning under the guise of being “agile.”
The exercise of planning isn’t about creating certainty; it’s about coordinating your movements in the middle of uncertainty. Without some kind of plan, teams drift, dependencies break, and priorities silently compete.
The challenge comes when “following the plan” becomes more important than “responding to change.” And the fear of that inverted priority freezes many leaders.
But if you can integrate change itself into you plan, you can insulate yourself from some of the uncertainty that may otherwise feel threatening.
What do I mean by integrating change into the plan?
First, make near-term and long-term expectations look different. As dates get farther away, describe less tactics and more strategy, less detail and more direction, less confidence and more exploration.
Second, highlight the current conditions and assumptions that informed the current plan. Where exploration is planned, highlight how the lessons learned in that exploration may change future direction.
Third, document explicit and frequent reflection points to check whether the conditions and assumptions that informed the plan still hold, and formally invite amendments to the plan. Include details on how those changes will be decided and communicated.
When you integrate change into the plan, then changing the plan doesn’t have to feel like failure and you can coordinate your journey together through uncertain circumstances.
And if you’d like to explore your specific uncertain circumstances further, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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