A “Good Enough” Planning Approach

Over the last few months, I’ve seen several RFPs from nonprofits that are seeking strategic planning support. They typically use terms like “5-year plan” (no one ever does a 2- or 4- or 6-year plan), and they include a dense list of requirements.

The problem of course is that whatever plan that arises from that process will be almost certainly wrong. This quote from Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of Basecamp, provides a good framing: 

“Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses.”

Here’s a different approach: Create strategic plans that are only “good enough” and put the rest of everyone’s energy into robust planning routines.

Put another way: planning >> plan.

A “good enough” plan: 

• Articulates an interesting and real outcome, such as “serve 2x the number of families” or “have a product with 99% customer love.” 

• Avoids an arbitrary or relative outcome like “our goal is $10m in revenue,” “our goal is to be the best,” or “we want to be #1 in our market.” 

• Is minimally plausible.

• Doesn’t require Evel Knievel stunts to achieve it.

That’s it.

Why not go much deeper? Because the juice is in the iterative, dynamic routines of implementation. 

So in reality, rather than making fixed assumptions for the plan, you choose to outline just the most important assumptions and then continually test and update them.

Rather than holding one customer research cycle, you implement always-on customer engagement and bring their views into the ongoing product/service design process.  

Rather than committing to specific outcomes from your boss, you commit to “Here’s what we’re going to work on, and we’ll see after that.” 

That last one is often the hardest part. Having a plan feels good because it feels more certain. It enables your boss to tell his boss…to tell her boss, “We have a plan, and this PowerPoint presentation proves it.” But that certainty is illusory. 

The issue, as the Rework authors articulate well, is that when there’s a PLAN, it can introduce stasis into the actual implementation. They write:

“When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. ‘This is where we’re going because, well, that’s where we said we were going.’ And that’s the problem: Plans are inconsistent with improvisation.”

Of course, as a tactical matter, this mindset is harder to implement when we need to make huge capital commitments—like building a factory and buying big equipment, or buying a house or paying for college in our personal lives. Surely, it pays to make sure you have the money in the bank for those purchases. 

But anyone (even if you find yourself in that situation) can still adopt an agile orientation to planning.