The Planning Wars

David Schmaltz - June 30, 2005

Two years and two months after President Bush stood in front of a ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign to declare an end to major combat operations in Iraq, the war’s planning continues to be fervently contested. And regardless of ideological sides, it is a debate that reveals both common misconceptions and inescapable truths about the nature of planning. Here’s a project management perspective.

Any experienced project manager can tell you that planning any project gets complicated, and is never simply a matter of surveying territory and then drawing a map. The territory can never be surveyed beforehand, so experience can be no more than a minor contributor to the success of any effort. Our confidence in our experience can, however, always be a significant threat to success. I am probably as tired as you are of hearing all the complaints about the poor planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom. But whether you oppose or support the effort, the arguments surrounding the planning for the effort illustrate some common misunderstandings about planning and projects.

 

Six Common Misconceptions About Project Planning

1. Different projects have a lot of similarities.

Assuming similarity can create more trouble than assuming it away. Still, assumptions must be made and scenarios developed based upon an impossibly large array of possibilities. Politics always complicate the considering. The inescapable complications associated with each of these scenarios always effectively nullify the accuracy of the resulting map. We plan not so much to predict, but to see how our assumptions hold together under coherent scrutiny.

 

2. Most projects survive the planning stage.

Most don't. It's usually better for the world that they die in planning. Planning serves as a dedication test for those plotting the course. If this community cannot stomach the minor but nonetheless daunting difficulties encountered when planning, they would never have survived the infinitely more significant difficulties when actually completing the project. Planning filters aspiration into objective, intention into action. It cannot be reasonably intended to show how the project will actually get done, but rather, at best, it can pose an acceptable scenario under which agreement can be reached to start pursuing the objective.

 

3. Most plans survive the project.

The moment any plan is put into action, it starts proving the planners wrong. This does not mean that the plan is useless, however. Since even the best plans are wrong, those charged with achieving the objective must use some other criteria than "rightness according to plan" to judge the success of their effort. We can usefully consider the plan's usefulness, which is almost always measured as how easily adaptable it is to unforeseen circumstances.

 

4. Someone else can create the plan.

Whoever's left out of the planning will complain no matter what the agreed-upon plan. Every plan represents both collaboration as well as compromise. The more differing points of view considered, even if some are discarded, the more broadly acceptable the resulting plan. In the case of a war plan, many of the affected constituencies must be barred from contributing their perspectives to the plan. This means that the planning process will necessarily disenfranchise some people. If powerful opponents are disenfranchised, they will seek later to disqualify the project, no matter how successfully the project achieves its objective.

 

5. Planning is mostly working out logistical details.

Part of every planning consists of resolving relatively straightforward logistical details. These elements are quite predictable, but are rarely the defining elements of any project. We can know, for instance, how to muster an aircraft carrier, even though there are ten thousand complications involved. We can say with considerable confidence that an aircraft carrier will arrive at a specific place on a specific date. These activities can largely be reduced into manageable problems, informed by practice and repetition, but they never define either the critical path or identify the riskiest pieces.

 

6. We can accurately assess the risk of our plans.

Some part of every project relies on factors that cannot be reduced to mere logistical certainty. These always define the true nature of the project. These elements are fuzzy, and retain their fuzziness no matter the assumptions we make about them. Our assumptions can at best reduce these activities into straight-forward-seeming logistical elements, but we are more likely to be fooled than informed by these reductions. They will appear identical to the straightforward logistical pieces once they are reduced to points on the resulting roadmap, but these elements are purely notional and have no practice or repetition, but only assumption, supporting them.

 

Given these common misconceptions, planning becomes an inescapably contradictory activity. The goodness of the effort can never be judged by the accuracy of the plan.

 

Six Inescapable Truths About Project Planning

The following simple truths about project planning were evident in the planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and highlight some key complicating factors within every planning process.

 

1. A powerful ideologue will propose the project.

Projects are initiated, in part, when someone decides to get passionate about something. Passion transforms reasoning people into ideologues. They become a fool for their mission, and their passion infects those around them. In business, this passionate advocate is often an executive whose vision might be supposed to be perfect, but it never is. Passion has dulled some of their senses, and so they bring a Bright Idea, an unproved aspiration, into the conversation.

 

Project initiation reminds me of the old Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland movies, where Mickey stands up in the middle of a confused crowd and yells, "I know, we can put on a show!" Of course, putting on a show means transforming a derelict barn into a Broadway theater, as well as writing a script, composing a score, choreographing the dance numbers, creating costumes, promoting the performance, selling tickets, and so on. The complications supporting that impassioned suggestion are never initially recognized.

 

Many complain that President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and others "conspired" for this war to occur. Of course they did. All significant efforts start with a conspiracy of sorts, and usually one founded more on ideology than any grounded reality. Countless projects are born out of irrational assertions.

 

2. The sponsor will have preconceived notions, based upon tenacious belief, not fact, which they will insist upon including in the plans.

Whoever proposes the project will believe that they know how to achieve it. They might acknowledge that they are not the experts in the field, but they will bring powerful preconceived notions into the situation. Their Bright Idea will most often not focus solely upon the objective, but also on naive notions of the means for achieving the objective. A suitable objective will most often be backfilled to fit into the proposal. The original proposal is almost always an implementation alternative, one of an unacknowledged variety of means for achieving an objective, and rarely the optimal or best alternative for achieving that objective.

 

Such was the case with Operation Iraqi Freedom, where sabers started rattling before other alternatives were deeply considered. The objective finally agreed upon, "regime change" and "democratization" came into the conversation later. Secretary of State Powell convinced the President to consider utilizing the United Nations, but the historical record shows that this alternative was pursued after the decision was made to wage war. If the UN option had worked to the satisfaction of the ideologue, the war might have been averted. But such alternatives usually fail in the face of an originating ideologue's insistence upon being the judge of whether the alternatives work.

 

Success usually boils down to satisfying the ideologue's preconceived notions, not to planning the most effective, efficient or reasonable path to the objective.

 

3. The experts will have a minority position in the planning.

The experts always have a minority position in the negotiations for the plan. They might know better than the ideologue, but the ideologue is paying the bills and has the political power to say, "Yes!" and make it stick. Planning always occurs in an environment where one constituency has more power than others. The best plans result from peer-to-peer conversations, but such situations rarely occur in the real world. In business no less than in government, the experts may sit at the planning table, but they rarely get to define the outcome or even deeply influence the means for achieving the outcome. Every professional has experienced these compromising situations, where their best judgment is found unacceptable, and they are exhorted to come up with a more acceptable suggestion.

 

Some mount their high horse and storm from the table, sacrificing their opportunity to influence the result. Many in the diplomatic community complained about the duplicitous diplomacy surrounding the Iraqi Freedom negotiations. A few resigned. But as The New Yorker Magazine writer Seymour Hersh noted, many more decided to stay at the table rather than sacrifice their potential influence on the conversation. Some in the military complained after the fact that they were unable to influence Secretary Rumsfeld to approve what they considered to be adequate troop strength in the approved plan. Rumsfeld reports that the generals had agreed to the final plan, and they had. But acquiescence might better describe their form of buy-in.

 

The difficulty of negotiating from a position of little power is that both leaving the negotiations and agreeing to the ideologue's imperative compromises the expert's influence.

 

4. There will be pressures to use someone's notions of a better strategy, even though it will not have been thoroughly tested in the real world.

The urge to do a project differently ("better") than the last one — whether it represents real learning from past experience or simply a notion of what should improve execution — always sits at the planning table. There can be no definitive supporting argument for accepting these ideas, since they have not been tested in any real-world situation. Even where a tested strategy exists, heavy pressure always intrudes to trim that experience to make it more efficient, even more effective, or somehow more alluring than the same old thing.

 

In business, these urges drive executives to issue wholly irrational mandates, such as the large financial institution that insisted that every large project employ a new and untested technique, as if that would guarantee success. Rather than test the technique on the smallest insignificant effort, the mandate demanded that it be showcased center stage, ensuring that the inevitable start-up complications would appear in the brightest spotlight, where even the most supportive constituents could see it fail.

 

The planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom arrived in the middle of a turf war between the established orthodoxy in the Pentagon, which believed in bringing overwhelming force to bear, and Rumsfeld's civilian team, which passionately believed in the idea of small, tactical forces combined with overwhelming air power. There was little experience present in either the Pentagon or Rumsfeld's crew as to how such a force might be deployed in this specific situation, but this new boundary condition held through several iterations of the plan.

 

It's important to understand that this is neither right nor wrong. Plans need some bounding conditions, and to the extent that this condition was firmly held by those with the most power in the negotiations, it was a net benefit in planning, if not execution. Firmly held boundary conditions can serve as a pseudo-firm foundation for planning. It's only in execution that such imperatives might appear as shortcomings in the planning. Again, neither position could be proven "right," but only one could be found acceptable.

 

5. Those supporting the plan will paint it with glorious colors.

Once the plan is in place, those supporting it will start selling it. Rather than sell it on its merits, however modest, supporters tend to sell it with unconditional superlatives. No plan is the best of all possible plans, being the product of artificially imposed conditions and compromise, but you'd never know that from hearing the testimony of the die-hard supporters.

 

Operation Iraqi Freedom was sold as a cakewalk, a walkover, a plan that would guarantee the immediate surrender of the enemy. Supporters predicted "Shock and Awe." In practice, only best-case scenario plans usually ever gain approval, even though no project ever encounters best cases. Our aspiration for ease and convenience and our disdain of complications usually render us unable to accept as reasonable any but the most unreasonable plans. We insist, instead, upon having already figured out what could not have possibly been determined. Mentioning complications gets you painted as incompetent for not knowing how to overcome them. Finally, the many constituencies insist upon a bright and shining lie as a condition of their acceptance. Leaders who level publicly about the complications are cast as weak and uninspiring. Until the project begins, and the unavoidable complications become the motivating force, a fairy-tale spin colors the plan with glorious colors.

 

6. No matter what's finally decided, the plan will be wrong.

It took less than a week after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom for the critics to start complaining about the plan. Momentum was stalled. The plan was wrong. The leadership was incompetent. After a short period of defending the plan, leaders focused upon the objective and the inevitability of achieving it. Critics were characterized as weak sisters, without the stomach needed to really succeed. The insights of famous military historians were dusted off and presented as new insight. "No plan ever survives an encounter with the enemy." "The enemy always has a say in how the plan executes."

 

Supporters of the plan looked foolish, as the predicted cakewalk stumbled through all of the usual difficulties. Then, supporters began explaining how much worse it might have been, even though it was not quite as easy as originally anticipated. Others marveled at how smoothly the field commanders adapted to unforeseen conditions. Some frontline troops started consuming only one meal per day while supply lines were secured. Others focused upon the valiant efforts of the coalition's troopers. Others explained that mistakes were inevitable.

 

As long as the plan is defended, the project cannot meaningfully adapt. One curious indicator of the probability of a project's success is the length of time the ideological leader, the passionate "fool" who originally proposed the effort, defends his or her original plan. Eventually, as with Operation Iraqi Freedom, the individuals assigned to the effort decide the outcome. This is never achieved according to the plan, even though the planning itself might fuel or encumber the adaptations necessary to finally achieve the objective.

 

An Unexceptional Example

As an example of real-world planning, Operation Iraqi Freedom is unexceptional. Politics will ultimately determine the success of this initiative, even though for a time the plan was held as the roadmap for success. The constituencies debating the effort’s purpose and execution are unlikely to ever agree on its success. Some will leave delighted with the outcome, while others will remain disgruntled.

 

Those of us who plan projects for a living are not surprised by these results, as each of our projects have experienced similar tangles. Most project managers are tempted by those who promise to rationalize the planning process, but some of us have long ago discarded any naive notion that we could bring such an irrational operation under rational control. We understand that our projects could not be meaningfully improved by believing in such fairy tales.

 

The critics, of course, will rail on. But most of the railing will be rooted in utter ignorance of what it really means to plan together. The ideologue, though a complicating factor, gets the effort started. We would not initiate projects without their irrational exuberance. They will have ignorant notions of how the objective should be achieved, and the political power to force those notions into practice, no matter what the experts insist. All will agree to pursue some better strategy, even though no one can prove anything about it. The resulting compromise will be painted in glorious colors, promising more than it could ever deliver. And, ultimately, the plan will be proven wrong in execution, and the individuals assigned to the effort will be left to decide how to really achieve the objective, or some politically acceptable substitute.

 

And the result can be delightful. The process for achieving the result can even be delightful, but only if we can let go the idea that we are supposed to be creating something as planned. What we do in the face of clear evidence that it's not going to turn out as planned ultimately defines the success of our efforts.

 

David A. Schmaltz is the author of The Blind Men and the Elephant, Mastering Project Work, and the founder of True North pgs, Inc., a strategic consultancy focused upon helping individuals within organizations work together better. True North’s Mastering Projects Workshop and Beyond Leadership residential teach people how to build communities capable of engaging in more fully authentic conversations. David also serves on the Projects@Work editorial board. Engage him in an "authentic conversation" at [email protected].

 

 

 

---

Comments (1)