Roadmaps for change are thus mere hypotheses, in both journey and destination. They represent the aspirations, desires, and hopes of their creators while putting forward a step-by-step action plan for how these objectives might be achieved. Herein lies the essence of the Roadmap Fallacy: a tool originally developed to represent existing realities doesn’t work well as a mental model for creating new realities.
Source: Innovating in Complexity (Part I): Why Most Roadmaps Lead Straight to the Graveyard
Tag: planning
Dear PMs, It’s time to Rethink Agile at Enterprise Startups
Eisenhower knew that any plan crafted before battle would be obsolete at first contact with the enemy. In his work, Kavazovic wants to be this realistic too. “Translating this into tech: no long-term plan or product vision survives contact with the user in the product-design sense. That’s why agile methodology is specifically designed to create user experiences that work,” he says. “It’s absolutely suboptimal to design a particular product all the way down to years’ worth of features, make that the blueprint, and build it out.” Inevitably, sticking to a rigid long-term plan without a mechanism to iterate on user feedback would result in features users don’t want, costly re-dos and potentially total product failure.
Source – Dear PMs, It’s time to Rethink Agile at Enterprise Startups
On Conference Speaking · Hynek Schlawack
“I’ve seen quite a bit of the world thanks to being invited to speak at conferences. Since some people are under the impression that serial conference speakers possess some special talents, I’d like to demystify my process by walking you through my latest talk from start to finish.”
The futility – and value – of planning
In his recent article Planning is very important…. It doesn’t work, Jack Vinson has this insight into planning:
If they hadn’t planned, there is no chance they would have been able to accomplish what they wanted to do. At the same time, if they had decided that the plan was exactly what they were going to do, they would have never made it either.
This is a lesson I learned very early on in my military career, and something I wrote about back in March 2005 (has it really been that long?) while digesting the ideas in Malcolm Gladwell’s then-new book Blink. The following is a slightly edited version of those original thoughts.
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Have been spending a lot of time “adjusting” plans lately. A colleague made the following comment today in one of our many (many many) sessions:
He who plans early, plans twice.
Which got me thinking about the apparent futility, and the obvious value, of planning.
The aphorism “No plan survives first contact with the enemy” is absolutely true. Proper preparation, though, can make that fact largely irrelevant. The very act of planning, and rehearsing that plan, involves preparation that enables you to effectively react to most any situation that may arise. In other words, proper planning allows you to IMPROVISE.
“What?” you say. “Improvise? That’s fine for comedy and music, but military operations? Business? I don’t think so. The whole purpose of planning is so you know what is going to happen, and when it is going to happen. Not to just wing it.”
In an Industrial Age setting, I may have agreed with that. But in the Information Age, I strongly disagree. If you tie yourself too tightly to a plan, and stick to it no matter what, you are doomed to fail.
As an example, consider a football (American) team – or any other team sport, for that matter. It is possible to develop a detailed game plan that dictates every play you will use, and when you will use them in the game. You could make a simple list of plays: On the first play, do this; On the second play, do that. etc. Or you could have a more detailed plan: If it is second and under 5 yards, and we’re in the red zone, we do this. etc. You could even take it a step further and include separate options that take into account the opposition’s activities. Of course, the more contigencies you identify, the bigger the play book you have to carry around and the longer it may take to figure out exactly what to do.
What actually happens is that the team develops a basic game plan ahead of time and rehearses the execution of that plan. By doing this, the focus of the team becomes achieving the goal of winning the game, and not just simply executing the plan.
I was inspired to write this post partly by a few key passages in Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Blink , in which he uses the obvious example of an improv comedy troupe (which in turn cites as one of their references a basketball team) to support the concept of “thin-slicing,” the ability to parse a given situation into the minimum information required to deal with that situation.
no straight lines 