The Value of Planning
Winston Churchill once said “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” What Churchill meant was that the value is in thinking something through, in planning it, before you do it. So this leads to some interesting questions: How much planning should we do? How can we get the most value out of our planning efforts? I wish I could tell you that there is solid research evidence to answer this question but sadly I haven’t been able to find any (if you know of any, I’d love to hear about it). Luckily though, we do have a lot of experience and observational evidence to fall back on.
From an accounting point of view we know that value is calculated as benefit minus cost. The implication is that all we need to do then is calculate the benefits of planning, and the costs of doing so, apply a bit of math and there you go. How hard could that be? As we know it’s very difficult to calculate the benefits because some are qualitative, requiring a bit of creativity to turn them into a monetary figure. The bigger challenge is that planning is just one activity of many that go into achieving a benefit making it difficult to tease out the planning portion of the benefit earned. Calculating the true costs of planning isn’t much easier when you start to consider the downstream implications of the work required to gather the inputs that go into the planning process. This is a …
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"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." - Pablo Picasso |
