Plans are not commitments. If I can commit to a plan, it is a very bad one. If I want to commit to a plan I created before starting, I am accepting I will not learn anything useful during the journey, that is, by actually doing the work. I am not yet ready to accept that, are you?
A plan is the result of planning. Planning, the act, is the important thing. When planning we often detail what it would look like when we achieve what we want, what needs done, the methods by which we can make it happen, the risks and opportunities involved, mitigation and possible courses of action to respond to those foreseeable circumstances. A plan is not an end date, a work breakdown or a rigid course of action, but it can contain some of those things and even multiple variants of them depending on factors unknown or unknowable before we start.
Reassessing our plan regularly as we go is a wise thing to do, even more so when we cannot reach our destination using a well-known, repeatable, and predictable path. We can call that approach progressive or adaptive planning. If nothing new is discovered since last assessment we just keep course with the previous version of the plan, only a bit further along the journey. Often we will need to adapt our plan to accommodate some discoveries as reality unfolds. Possibly, we discover something so different to what we expected than the previous plan does not make sense anymore and we create a new one from scratch. In some cases we may discover our objective is not reachable or it is no longer desirable and we abandon the objective altogether. In short, plans change along the way.
Then, what is it that I can commit to? I believe the answer is more nuanced that never committing or commit to any plan that you create. Business requires some predictability in due dates, quality we can trust or actual cost close enough to our estimates. In order to take a responsible approach to committing, we need to forecast. We use the hard won knowledge we acquired through planning to forecast a set (not one) of foreseeable end results for that variable and their associated uncertainties.
To commit I have to answer a very difficult question: how likely is it that I deliver on the expected result or better? The context will also help me understand how much risk is acceptable in my commitment. Often we have to commit to something under most or all currently foreseeable circumstances. That is industrial-strength likelihood. Hence, the most likely result is not the answer. Instead we should commit to what we can deliver in most foreseeable scenarios, even in the bad ones. Most of the times that does not include unprecedented earthquakes, unforeseen disasters or great new technologies that will reduce the required effort to a tenth, but the ones we can expect. Of course, if I am planning in times of COVID-19, that is at the time of writing this, and I am not including contingencies for outbreaks and other disruptions created by the pandemic, I am being foolish.
When the unexpect-able happens, the black swan, our commitment will not hold. But that is a different story.
This is the first post in a series about planning. See also:
[This entry had been previously posted to my blog at javierart.wordpress.com]
The Adaptive Executive 
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