Planning Fallacy

“You won’t get anything done by planning” – Karl Pilkington (The Podfather Trilogy)Does that plan really help? Even when it gets to 100 or more pages? Perhaps you’re working with not just one but dozens of plans, constantly being circulated, revised and ultimately not followed.

What about the types of plans?

There’s business, project, program, safety, quality, test, evaluation, construction, design, completion, change management, stakeholder management, communication, audit, inspection, development, training, strategic, tactical, operational, succession, financial, resource, retirement, recovery, travel, environmental, emergency, crisis management, implementation, insurance, contingency, and health plans. There are even plans to coordinate the ever growing number of plans.

With all these plans in place, at least we’re meeting our milestones and achieving everything we planned for…right?

While that planning document might look impressive, it ultimately depends on people to implement it. Here are some psychological factors that influence the effectiveness of planning and the execution of these plans.

It’s hard to predict the future

“That just doesn’t happen”Planning essentially involves trying to think through how the future will play out. There are, however, several psychological biases that undermine our capacity to do this. For example, humans have a tendency to underestimate complexity when thinking about the future, called the planning fallacy. That is, we dream up idealistic scenarios and downplay the risks–the optimism bias–and forget a lot of the complications that slowed us down last time.

Let’s form a team

“Let’s lock ourselves away and smash it out”Of course, teamwork is important but when planning as a group, the planning fallacy is exacerbated. Groups tend to be even more optimistic when planning for the future and they are also motivated to align and agree, called groupthink, rather than debate, challenge and explore better alternatives.

We need a detailed plan

“Put together a detailed plan”No doubt, the analysis and planning activities that went into the plan can have enormous benefit but details and complexity do not mean something is of high quality. Humans often believe more detail equals higher quality or credibility–the effort heuristic.

It can also give us a false sense of security. After all, if we think something looks more credible, then we don’t necessarily challenge it. Worse still, there may be some important and clever ideas buried in a sea of detail that never see the light of day.

What about the people?

“It’s all there! People just need to read it!”Ultimately, a plan is only effective when people persist in executing it. For example, research shows that when people simply reflect on why they are pursuing a goal, they are able to persist at completing this goal for longer. Presumably, asking why helps you reinforce the purpose behind the goal. However, under time poor conditions, where we don’t have the concentration to ask why, performance deteriorates.

There is also a long line of research that shows that people simply prefer to pursue tasks that they want to pursue rather than those they are obliged to.

Although this sounds basic enough, how many times do organisations use performance monitoring, compliance activities, and mandates to try and get people to do things?

What’s the solution?

You mean, what’s the plan?