Planning and the Illusion of Solving
One of the most difficult aspects of planning is staying focused on articulating the plan. Trying to solve a problem you identify while planning is always appealing and, in my experience, never really works out. A significant problem can’t be solved with past experience or historical data and requires a hypothesis that should be tested and validated.
A good plan needs to identify problems, contain the ways you intend to discover the solutions, and show which problems are dependent on other solutions. Even with just a few moving parts, this can quickly become unwieldy. Why add guessing to the mix?
A Quick Solution… It’s a Trap!
With experience comes the urge to use it. When problems pop up while planning, the knee-jerk reaction is to look to your past, find a reasonably similar scenario, and choose to use a similar or better solution. Once that solution has worked it’s way into the conversation, people will rely on it for all future solutions.
The margin of error for solutions based on past experiences should be small. Unfortunately, when you start working on a plan that relies on several layers of perceived solutions the margins of error can multiply and a lot of skill and good intentions will still blow up in your face. What’s worse, is that it can be really, really hard to know what piece of the puzzle caused the failure.
Even when you’re working with the smartest people in the world, alarms should be going off when people are solving problems on-the-fly and incorporating them into the plan.
Momentum is Better than Speed
Taking the time to challenge assumptions, test theories, and validate assumptions can be time consuming. Fortunately, once you’ve identified a problem and verified the solution, there’s less to consider for each following problem. Even a slow team that challenges itself and validates their assumptions will eventually be more productive than a fast team who skips that part.