Since the release of the best-selling book REWORK by 37signals, I’ve had several clients excitedly tell me that they don’t need to plan. They already weren’t planning (in ways, to their peril), and they were excited to hear that they didn’t need to start. I’m always open to learning new things so I decided to investigate this advice. My understanding is that the book is a repackaging of their blog “Signal vs. Noise.” In searching the blog, I found two articles from last year about planning:
The only plan is learn as you go (May 5, 2009), and
The planning fallacy (June 12, 2009).
Let’s look at these two articles in more detail.
The only plan is to learn as you go
In this article, the author argues that plans are only guesses that the only plan you should be making is on improvising. He quotes Rita Gunther McGrath from Columbia University and Ian McMillan, the Wharton professor on innovation and entrepreneurship (and someone I had while I was at school there), and cites an interview on Knowledge@Wharton with these professors and authors. After reading the blog post and the entire interviews, I do not see how the author of this post could have arrived at the conclusions that he did unless he only read the introduction to the article and the first few questions and answers of the interview. More details on McMillan’s definition of “non-planning” in Part 2 of this post.
The planning fallacy
Here the author quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post called the Planning Fallacy. Again he picks and chooses from the original article (which is itself a summary of other people’s research) to make his point. The experiments quoted here show that people are overly optimistic in their assessments of how long it takes to complete projects and tasks. And while Yudkowsky’s article concludes with suggestions to overcome the planning fallacy and to improve your ability to make time projections, “Matt” advises you to skip the “messy planning stage.”
How they get so far off
Like many traditional journalists and religious fundamentalists, Matt found quotes to support his beliefs. Unarguably 37signals is an impressively successful company and maybe this “no planning” philosophy works for them. But because of their success and their marketing skills, they are now in a place to influence others with their thoughts and ideas. When those ideas are drawn from the miscontextualizations of the derivatives of other people’s work, be careful.
To be continued:
NEXT WEEK: Smart planning. We’ll revisit the interview with McGrath and McMillan and the article by Yudkowsky to see how we as business owners and entrepreneurs we can become more successful using planning in a smart effective way.
{ 4 comments }
I’ve just had a session with a client who plans nothing – and achieves …well, nothing. He’s very frustrated that he doesn’t get anything done in his life and has no direction. Starting NOW we have plans and accountability. I don’t know how you can reach your true potential without at least a little thought and planning.
Started life with lots of plans, BIG PLANS, had four children and well, let’s just say too many of my well-made plans blew-up, and after a lot of years of experiencing the unexpected, I blew-off planning altogether. I went from creating to reacting. Life moves forward, kids grow upwards, and things come full-circle. Trust me, lots happens, great things emerge, and life goes on, without any planning whatsoever. But if you want to get somewhere in particular, you need, at the very least to IDENTIFY its location and INTEND on arriving, which really is all planning is. The trick for me now is not to give up on the destination, no matter how often the route there changes, and just MOVE FORWARD.It is the simplest way to make dreams come true.
xoxo
Thanks so much for sharing your story. Great example!
Exactly. Some small business owners get caught in analysis paralysis – but that’s not the same as planning even. You can analyze without planning – and end up just chasing your tail. The more common ailment is under-planning!
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