Planning is an active, iterative, learning process
Planning is most effective when it is positioned as the first step of doing, in an iterative process of experimental discovery.
Planning, as I see it, is not merely sitting and thinking, much less a rule-based bureaucratic exercise of programming. It is an active process. Planning is doing: Try something, see if it works, and try something else in light of what you’ve learned. Planning is iteration and learning before you deliver at full scale, with careful, demanding, extensive testing producing a plan that increases the odds of the delivery going smoothly and swiftly.[1]
See also:
- Design Thinking is innovating routinely
- Monkey First principle dictates building the hardest part of the moonshot first
- Reframing shifts perspective to see things in a new way
- Premortem works backward from an undesirable outcome in order to prevent it
How Big Things Get Done – Flyvbjerg and Gardner (2023), ch. 4, § “Testing, Testing.” ↩︎