It’s Not Planning That Stifles Innovation, But Slavishly Sticking With A Plan

In a recent article How Business Planning and Reporting Can Kill Innovation, the author makes the case that planning is bad for innovation because it rivets everyone’s attention, taking along with it the company’s budget money, monitoring resources and reporting infrastructure, in the service of executing yesterday’s ideas, closing the door to new and better ones that come along.

He makes the very valid point that forward planning requires that we lock down our plans far in advance, and that this can have the tendency to foreclose our willingness — and ability — to adjust to new information we acquire in the process of executing on those plans.

Consider this famous quote from Dwight David Eisenhower:

“Planning is everything; the plan is nothing.”

Ike was trying to make a point here, but it’s important not to take his hyperbole too literally. It’s doubtful he really meant the plan is actually worthless. Rather, I think he meant the real problem is not planning itself, but getting stuck with executing an ironclad plan that is, by its very nature and the pure passage of time, becoming more and more obsolete by the day.

Doing away with planning is a mistake. Compared with keeping everything open all the time, and failing to commit to a particular direction, we learn more helpful things by heading out with some goal in mind and having the resolve to achieve it. Where we go wrong is in stubbornly clinging to the plan and refusing to allow new information, insights and learnings to influence and change our direction.

In a previous post How To Take Calculated Risks For Business Growth, we provided a simple method of preparing a financial analysis to help decide whether to undertake an initiative.

The steps we set forth were purposely very mechanical and objective because they are part of the front-end go/no-go decision to embark on a new initiative. Once the “go” decision is made, it’s critical that forward movement be implemented as part of an ongoing, continuous and iterative process of planning and doing and monitoring and learning and modifying the plan.

That way, as you move ahead and get smarter, the plan gets better, and the outcome will be better.

As I suggested in another recent post:

“Resolve to stay in a learning and adapting mode, but don’t let your project fail to get off the ground because you (proudly) announce that your customer need satisfaction goals were ‘fuzzy.”