Planning Is Guessing

From Rework (Crown Business, 2010), a book of short essays by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals (the software company behind Basecamp). “Planning is guessing” is one of the chapter titles, restated by the authors on their principles page at 37signals.com/33, in their REWORK Podcast episode of the same name, and in a March 2017 Signal v. Noise post by Fried under the same title.

The chapter’s anchor line is “Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses.” The reasoning is that calling the document a “plan” makes you feel in control of factors (markets, competitors, customers, the economy) you cannot actually control, and calling it a “guess” instead lowers the confidence to where it belongs.

The principles page pairs the relabeling with concrete advice: “Replace years with weeks. 3 year plan? Make it a 3 week plan. 10 year plan? 10 week plan. Plan more often, not less often.”

Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian general staff, reached the same verdict in 1871: “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force,” later worn down to “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Eisenhower, who oversaw the planning of the D-Day landings, said: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” When the unexpected hit, his own instruction was to “throw them out the window and start once more.”