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"The Right Plan Is to Have No Plan"

Pissed-off leopard

The above is the Gospel of No Gospel as pronounced by economist William Easterly in his masterly book, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

As I prepared for my recent Kenya trip and seminar, I "read in" as usual. One eye-popping article was an Easterly piece, "The Ideology of Development," in Foreign Policy magazine (July/August 2007). Easterly argues that "Development" is at least as dangerous an ideology as communism and fascism, which is quite an assertion. "Development," he writes, "promises a comprehensive final answer to all of society's problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and despotic rulers. It shares the common ideological characteristic of suggesting there is only one correct answer, and it tolerates little dissent." Easterly blasts, among others, the likes of Jeffrey Sachs and, indirectly, Bono.

The deal is this—and I am drawn to it because it mirrors exactly my own half-century journey and rant: Namely "planners," especially "master planners," more or less believe that the plan is the thing—and that the messy process of implementation on the ground will take care of itself if The Plan is "right." (Reminiscent of Iraq, eh?) In The White Man's Burden, Easterly describes "planners" and "searchers." While planners treat the plan as holy writ, searchers live by rapid trial and error and learn through constant experimentation and adjustment. To wit:

"In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don't motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. ... A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors; a Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions; a Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown."

For me, Easterly's book is a genuine "page-turner." As I said, it confirms a half century plus set of biases. My "ideology"—my only ideology—is unabashedly rapid fire trial and error. (Bob Waterman and I labeled this "a bias for action," our first of Eight Basics that were the centerpiece of In Search of Excellence. Our conclusion was that business's #1 problem was, "Too much talk, too little do." As the pace of change has accelerated, the problem has only gotten worse.)

I lay my biases out as best I can in Part Two ("Innovate. Or die.") of my Master presentation—which I am linking once again to this Post. A small sample therefrom:

"Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix them. I look for things that went right, and try to build off them."—Bob Stone, head of Al Gore's surprisingly successful program to "re-invent government," which consisted of mostly low visibility, high impact experiments that Stone et al. spread via what we now call "viral marketing."

"Somewhere in your organization, groups of people are already doing things differently and better. To create lasting change, find these areas of positive deviance and fan the flames."—Richard Pascale & Jerry Sternin, "Your Company's Secret Change Agents," Harvard Business Review

"We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn't think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we're already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months."—Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Mike Bloomberg's business saga

William Easterly, Mike Bloomberg, and I pretty much agree, to quote Easterly: "The Right Plan Is to Have No Plan."

I urge you to try the book—it is indeed important, especially if we wish to see all the newfound attention to Africa actually lead to real progress. Like Easterly, I think we are mostly on the wrong path.

(My other "bible" for "all this" is Henry Mintzberg's The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning.)

(Speaking of Africa, and my recent trip there to, you'll see a blurry picture of a pissed-off leopard above—presumably you can figure out why it's blurry.)

Tom Peters posted this on 08/01/07.

Comments

Oh, so are you saying you were one of Rumsfeld's advisors?

Posted by frank at August 1, 2007 8:46 PM

Yes. Thanks, Tom for shining the light on this miss-understood area. I was on the "Development" side and saw the light in Enterprise Facilitation. We (Enterprise Facilitators) are the "Searchers" in communities living Dr. Ernesto Sirolli's statement; "The future of every community lies in capturing the passion, imagination and resources of its people."

Ripples from the Zambezi is a quick read that lays open many of the points Tom breaks out here.

Want to really help? Listen and then get into action.

Posted by Melvin at August 1, 2007 10:36 PM

Doesn't the ability to successfully execute the No Plan scenario imply certain prerequisites? For example, people with a mindset that change is an ally, and with a set of knowledge and skills that allows them to work with that ally.

One doesn't, it seems to me, take any old Tom, Dick, and Harry off the street, say "We have no plan, have at it," and romp to success.

No, I think there is some planning associated with the No Plan scenario. Perhaps I'm putting too fine a point on this.

Jim

Posted by James Drogan at August 2, 2007 6:33 AM

Excellent post and brings together a number of your "teachings". Having no plan is of course a plan but that gets us into semantics. It's the bias for action that is important - striving for innovation & development.
I'll have to get the book, but the idea that development is an ideology is very interesting. I would argue that we have gone too far to turn back now, but as we "develop" we should also increase our tolerance to those who have other points of view.

Posted by Steve at August 2, 2007 7:15 AM

Hi Tom,

The key word is "fun", meaning having no plan fixed is more fun, because one gets to explore and play. And fun and play is a great motivational factor. Nothings like being bored from having to draw up a plan, to may one dull and dum. But thats me, a Thai that still likes to have fun, in the fun and play capital of the world-that is untill the damn dictator took over the country-and now it is a planned oreiented society.

Terry

Posted by Terry at August 2, 2007 7:22 AM

1. Easterly is something of a low IQ racist/sexist though - the USA model to build Japan & Germany & Europe [post their blundering habitually into world wars] & even to buy out mini-me recently in North Korea - is effective & efficient - based on free enterprise & human potential freedoms & freedom to worship [wake up Islam].

2. Clearly England's perverse historical colony model of pillage & plunder though make's Easterly's argument partly valid - Anglophile & "royalty" disdain resonates worldwide to this day.

Posted by Sean at August 2, 2007 8:34 AM

I am having a balancing problem here.

Many posts are about design and the importance of design and others about not planning. Somewhere I am missing the distinction. For me design in the process of solving a problem to come up with a "best" solution. (I think Bill Buxton does an excellent job describing this.) Isn't this planning or are we making a distinction of "Plan" vs "plan?"

If you do not have a plan of some sort don't you end up with the problem of building an apartment complex one room at a time? No plan, just dig a hole and build the first room. Once someone claims that and a new room is required start building. How do you get where you need to be without a cohesive design to frame the direction?

Posted by mtp at August 2, 2007 9:14 AM

When we designed the new banner at tompeters.com, we didn't start with a Plan.
What would the Plan look like?

Find a designer whose vision we like.
Hammer out the financial details.
Set a deadline for the first ideas to be presented.
Set a timeframe for commenting on those ideas.
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

Instead, we asked a designer whose ideas we liked to give us some preliminary mock-ups and we gave her some feedback and she came back with some revisions and we decided on one and met to hash out the details and chose some images that we liked and she gave us another sample and we replaced a couple of images and ... we finished with a new banner.

We completed the task, but we didn't spend a moment spelling out how we would do the work. We just did it. (With apologies to Nike for using their line.) (Note that Tom's rapid prototyping idea is the heart of our plan. Small p.)

Posted by cathy mosca at August 2, 2007 10:30 AM

The most important thing to progress is not the plan but a broad vision. Searching is the essential action necessary to form a clear vision. Action toward realizing a vision rather than a plan takes a creative path to arrives at the solution through discovery, experimentation and trial and error.

Years ago when I was making the final decision to quit my job and started my business; I went out for Chinese food with a friend. I didnâ€™t have a formal business plan in place at the time. My fortune cookie that night read, â€œGo ahead and shoot for the stars â€“ it wonâ€™t turn out like your vision, but it will be better in its own uniqueness.â€

Columbus had a vision that the World was round and if he sailed West he would reach his destination. If he had waited to develop a detailed plan he never would have set sail. He didnâ€™t reach his destination but he made a much more important discovery that forever changed the World.

It takes a vision not a plan to start down a path and entice others to follow.

Posted by MLM at August 2, 2007 11:47 PM

and, cathy, a little earlier this year you also quickly corrected the "25years of excellence" banner when it only showed the faces of white people photographed in black and white and in an energetic style that would have in fact made leni riefenstahl proud. ironically the pictures where even embedded in the classical nationalistic german color scheme "red, white, black".
...
first ship - then test.
...
when i saw it first my initial reaction was to drop you a short note of advice - but then again, criticizing without a mandate can be a tricky thing -- especially in the field of design. -- so i decided to hold my guns. and it did not take long and you saw it yourself and changed it.

Posted by jens at August 5, 2007 8:50 AM

I loved the posting and it hit home with a lot of the problems we see with clients. Our most successful clients take a few words of advice and run like crazy to try to implement. They experiment, fail, learn and retry constantly. Our slowest moving clients take 10-20 times longer to achieve the same results. The difference is amazing to watch. A few extended comments got posted on our blog at: http://www.dbrownonline.com/2007/08/master_plan_or_rapid_experimen.html

Posted by David Brown at August 5, 2007 12:46 PM

Jens, we always take those notes in the spirit they are sent. If they're meant to be helpful, we appreciate them very much, though we can't always act on good suggestions, and if we can, it might not be quickly.
Thanks for being patient.

Posted by cathy mosca at August 5, 2007 12:52 PM

I think having no plan is not good either.. There should always be a starting point, but when you implement the plan, the plan should be flexible enough to be adapted. Changes in the environment might occur, and you can learn from trial and error, which require your plan to become updated. For example, I'm doing my thesis right now and I made plan for the whole process! However, I learned from the method I used from the first part of the research, and I had to change the plan accordingly so I can better test a theory. I also use to challenge myself and my coach all the time, because not doing so will result in a thesis that is done EXACTLY the way done in other studies. Continuously looking how other students solved a problem doesn't help either for the same reason.

Anyway, planning and creativity needs to be combined to lead to excellent results!

Frank

Posted by Frank at August 5, 2007 5:30 PM

E.F. Schumacher's amazing book "Small is Beautiful" has a great chapter on Development. He explains that while "evolution" seems to be the natural path societies take, when it comes to development the West often tries to produce things by "creation" instead... i.e. building a big new power plant, without all the associated necessitites for said plant to really be organic and supported by the community (i.e. education, roads, etc).

Anyway, he says it all much better than I could.

Posted by Dan Ward at August 6, 2007 7:58 AM

I am an engineer and it is a tragedy if social development plans are like engineering plans.

Planning is simply the art of doing irrelevant things.

Posted by Tunca at August 10, 2007 1:15 AM

I think that "Fire...Ready...Aim" is a fun strategy to employ sometimes. Risks of doing so must be intelligently weighed but when you can use this approach, interesting things usually happen. You tend to gain insights that you wouldn't normally gain by doing it in reverse.

Nelson Bruton
inSocialMedia.com

Posted by Nelson Bruton at June 6, 2008 3:45 PM

This to me sums it up -

discount viagra online

A path is created by
- clarifying one's aims and
- removing what gets in the way of their realization.

It is carved from
- commitment and
- opened up by letting go.

It entails both
- doing something and
- allowing something to happen.

A path is both
- a task and
- a gift.

- In exerting too much control, one inhibits its spontaneous unfolding, whereas
- just by letting everything be, one loses sight of a guiding vision.

The art of creating a path is
- to do neither too much nor
- too little.

Stephen Batchelor

Posted by dean at July 12, 2008 4:13 PM