Leverage Weekly #70 - The art of planning
tl;dr - Planning is a complex skill with substantial payoff
These essays have proposed that organizations are machines made of people. Most have dealt with one or another aspect of organizational design: setting the schedule, determining the budget, hiring, management and oversight, and so forth. These machines, however, do not operate in a vacuum. They exist in an environment, frequently interacting with aspects of that environment, other machines, or both.
To be able to interact successfully with its environment, organizations typically need to have an understanding of that environment. Some environments are forgiving or contain nearby supporting entities. But in many cases, the environment is not forgiving, even treacherous, and there isn’t any other group that can help one’s organization succeed. In such a case, an organization must be able to understand its environment and turn that understanding into a plan.
Planning is frequently difficult; were it not, more organizations would seriously engage in it. There are many different approaches to planning and plans themselves can become rather complex. The hardest part, however, does not pertain to complexity. Rather, the most challenging part is that planning requires one to focus on terrible things that might go wrong until one finds a way to make sure those things won’t happen. It’s not the least pleasant thing in the world, but it can be very uncomfortable.
The good news is that planning is often possible and frequently highly beneficial. Plans can be useful even when organizations don’t stick to them or things change at the last minute, since the very act of planning is usually very valuable in its own right. Having a good plan shows the leaders of an organization what features the organization should have. Different circumstances call for different types of machines.
The virtues of planning having been adequately touted; how does one actually start? A good first step is goal clarification. What goals is the organization trying to achieve? For each goal, ask “why this?” over and over until something like bedrock is reached, then pick goals that accord with the actual scope of the organization. In some cases, it will be helpful to distinguish people’s personal goals from the goals of the organization or from broader societal goals. All are relevant, though the organization itself will serve particular purposes and not others.
After clarifying goals, it’s good to actually state a plan. Chain backwards from the selected goals, build forward from one’s current position, and look for intermediate waypoints that are plausible, charismatic, and set up the organization to succeed. These correspond to strategy, tactics, and leadership. Try to find the most plausible start-to-finish plan you can, recognizing that in some cases, it’s better to leave some things to chance or fate. Some things can be controlled but not everything, and maximizing one’s chances of success involves understanding the difference.
Once one has a plan, every step in the plan can be tested. What are the most likely conditions under which each fails? Whenever there are likely failure scenarios, add a backup plan. Do this until the plan is adequately fortified. In some cases, it may be necessary to add an entirely new, parallel strategy to make the plan sufficiently likely to work. Once the plan is fortified, one can start to optimize it, looking for faster ways to complete each step, identifying steps that can be cut out, and looking for tasks that can be done at the same time to add efficiency.
Planning is best done in the context of having studied many plans, some of which worked and many of which did not. One can judge how difficult it is to solve the problem one is working on both by looking directly at how it seems to execute one’s plan and by estimating at the total resources that have been spent trying to solve the problem. Ultimately, one should end up with a plan that seems as difficult as it should be, given how many others have tried and failed, and nevertheless appears accomplishable. These are some steps to take as one begins to learn the art of planning.
Planning is a complex skill with substantial payoff.
Two weeks past, Leverage’s attention was split between two things: supporting the Quantum Biology Institute and beginning to wrap things up for the quarter. The weekly presentation was on the topic of planning. Rather than a typical lightweight presentation, however, Geoff gave the QBI team a hard look of what planning actually involves. It’s not the sort of thing one can skimp on, really. The presentation was received really well and QBI is likely going to do a lot of planning in the near future.
Other than the presentation, Geoff continued managing Anna, who had turned her focus to the construction of a scientific advisory council for QBI. The plan is for that council to then help recruit additional board members. Melinda continued to provide advice and support to Jen, helping her to set up an HR function and more accessible budgets. Oliver, in turn, has been managing the revision of the QBI website, working both with people at QBI and an external design team.
In terms of quarterly wrap up, the team has started on the Q2 report for the board, expected in advance of the end-of-quarter board meeting. Geoff met with Dan to create a plan to finish and publish the Gray study on electrical repulsion. Oliver made more progress on analyzing the scientific funding landscape and investigating an anomaly Geoff may have identified. The team also spent time thinking about and developing capacity to do professional background checks.
Geoff and Oliver also spent some time thinking and talking about low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR). Geoff finished reviewing the LENR material from the team at MIT, and the two developed an explanation for why low-energy nuclear reactions, a.k.a. nucleonics, has been stuck for so long. It’s not a botched press release from decades ago. It’s the combination of technical challenges and institutional landscape in the context of very, very large possible financial prize. On this, more in the future.
Note: This Leverage Weekly covers the week of June 9-13.