Seven Planning Pitfalls: II

Teams engaged in formulating complex plans — for projects, marketing efforts, product rollouts, or even entire enterprises — tend to focus on controlling what they have the ability to control. They devise schedules, allocate resources, craft messages, and identify and manage risks. Attending to these factors is right and appropriate. But there are other elements in this world that are beyond the planning team's ability to control or even to influence significantly. And these factors can defeat the most carefully constructed plans, or they can cause the planning team to produce a plan that's inherently unworkable. Two examples of external factors that affect the planning process are priming effects and widely held but inapplicable beliefs.

Priming effects

Consider the chartering process. Chartering an effort, whether or not formally acknowledged as such, is the process that leads to agreement between the leaders of the organization and the leaders of the effort. That agreement provides a basis for the organization to allocate to the effort agreed-upon resources, in exchange for the team producing agreed-upon deliverables, with an agreed-upon level of quality, according to an agreed-upon timeline. When the planning team constructs a plan, it does so with the charter in mind. And at that juncture, external factors can enter and cause planning teams to produce unworkable plans.

Here's one way it can happen. Typically, organizational leaders have in mind their hopes for levels of required resources (R), capabilities of deliverables (C), levels of quality (Q), and timeline (T). If they ask planners questions of the form, "…what would it take to get me something that can do C?", the planners can produce an unbiased answer.

But often, organizational leaders somehow manage to communicate their RCQT targets to the planners. Then planners go off and produce a plan that meets the RCQT targets, more or less. In other words, knowing in advance the "right answer" for the plan tends to bias the planners. This bias can be benign if the targets set forth by the organizational leaders are within a reasonable range of practical values.

Unfortunately, that situation is uncommon. Typically, organizational leaders try to bias plans in their favor by setting targets that they know (or should know) are at the edge of the attainable range, if not beyond it.

Nevertheless, planners do try to produce plans Priming is an external factor that
can compromise the integrity of the
planning process, thereby elevating
the likelihood of planning teams
producing unworkable plans that meet the RCQT targets. And they convince themselves that the impossible is possible. They do so without realizing that their objectivity has been compromised. What's at work here are a number of cognitive biases known collectively as priming effects.

We are primed to respond to a particular situation in a particular way when a prior stimulus has influenced our thinking or perceptions. So when an organizational leader suggests that he or she might entertain a proposal for a project "if you can give me something that meets my RCQT targets," then we are "primed" to find a solution that meets RCQT. Sometimes we find solutions that aren't actual solutions, because of our overwhelming desire to meet the targets. And when that happens, it's common for planners to be unaware that their judgment has been compromised by their desire.

In this way, priming is an external factor that can compromise the integrity of the planning process, thereby elevating the likelihood of planning teams producing unworkable plans. Organizational leaders can limit this risk by asking planners to produce a range of plans for different combinations of R, C, Q, and T, while giving planners the freedom to trade aspects of one for aspects of the others.

Widely held but inapplicable beliefs

Widely held beliefs circulate in social groups in many forms, such as fads, dogma, regulations, and traditions. These beliefs can be based on evidence and reason. But many beliefs about how to plan aren't based on evidence at all. Others perhaps once were believed to be valid, but were actually based on mistaken interpretations of available data. Still others were once applicable, but have been overtaken by technological change. And some regulations, though once relevant and helpful, might be protecting us from troubles that no longer arise, or which cannot arise in the current context.

Consider this example of a clash between regulations and practice. Many organizations have adopted product development processes that incorporate the principles of agile development. But these same organizations continue to use quarterly or annual fiscal calendars to drive enterprise planning. The two planning processes — agile for development and calendar-driven for finance — are fundamentally incompatible in many respects.

The focus on calendar-based enterprise planning is realistic. It's far from an irrational fixation. There are laws, regulations, and accounting rules that constrain enterprises to produce calendar-based projections and reports. These external factors compel teams to produce plans that address concerns arising not only from the needs of the effort itself, but also from those externally imposed legal, financial, and regulatory constraints.

Successful planning within organizations that are employing agile methods for product development probably depends on finding an approach to integrating agile methods with the more conventional calendar-driven plans imposed by external constraints. One possibility is to use agile methods for the individual elements of product portfolios, and then rely on the statistics of the portfolio to produce results compatible with the needs of fiscal management.

In Part III of this exploration, we'll move from external factors to internal factors associated with the way we think.   First issue in this series    Next issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

Are your projects always (or almost always) late and over budget? Are your project teams plagued by turnover, burnout, and high defect rates? Turn your culture around. Read 52 Tips for Leaders of Project-Oriented Organizations, filled with tips and techniques for organizational leaders. Order Now!

Your comments are welcome

About Point Lookout

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and that you'll consider recommending it to a friend.

This article in its entirety was written by a human being. No machine intelligence was involved in any way.

Point Lookout is a free weekly email newsletter. Browse the archive of past issues. Subscribe for free.

Support Point Lookout by joining the Friends of Point Lookout, as an individual or as an organization.

Do you face a complex interpersonal situation? Send it in, anonymously if you like, and I'll give you my two cents.

Related articles

More articles on Cognitive Biases at Work:

Bullet Point Madness: II

Decision makers in many organizations commonly demand briefings in the form of a series of bullet points or a series of series of bullet points. Briefers who combine this format with a variety of persuasion techniques can mislead decision makers, guiding them into making poor decisions.

Be Choosier About Job Offers: I

A serious error some job seekers make is accepting an offer that isn't actually a good fit. We make this mistake for a variety of reasons, including hating the job-search process, desperation, and wishful thinking. How can we avoid the error?

Mental Accounting and Technical Debt

In many organizations, technical debt has resisted efforts to control it. We've made important technical advances, but full control might require applying some results of the behavioral economics community, including a concept they call mental accounting.

Clouted Thinking

When we say that people have "clout" we mean that they have more organizational power or social influence than most others do. But when people with clout try to use it in realms beyond those in which they've earned it, trouble looms.

The Risk Planning Fallacy

The planning fallacy is a cognitive bias that causes underestimates of cost, time required, and risks for projects. Analogously, I propose a risk planning fallacy that causes underestimates of probabilities and impacts of risk events.

See also Cognitive Biases at Work and Cognitive Biases at Work for more related articles.

Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

Coming January 22: Storming: Obstacle or Pathway?

The Storming stage of Tuckman's model of small group development is widely misunderstood. Fighting the storms, denying they exist, or bypassing them doesn't work. Letting them blow themselves out in a somewhat-controlled manner is the path to Norming and Performing. Available here and by RSS on January 22.

And on January 29: A Framework for Safe Storming

The Storming stage of Tuckman's development sequence for small groups is when the group explores its frustrations and degrees of disagreement about both structure and task. Only by understanding these misalignments is reaching alignment possible. Here is a framework for this exploration. Available here and by RSS on January 29.

Coaching services

I offer email and telephone coaching at both corporate and individual rates. Contact Rick for details at rbrenjTnUayrCbSnnEcYfner@ChacdcYpBKAaMJgMalFXoCanyon.com or (650) 787-6475, or toll-free in the continental US at (866) 378-5470.

Get the ebook!

Past issues of Point Lookout are available in six ebooks:

• Get 2001-2 in Geese Don't Land on Twigs (PDF, )
• Get 2003-4 in Why Dogs Wag (PDF, )
• Get 2005-6 in Loopy Things We Do (PDF, )
• Get 2007-8 in Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True (PDF, )
• Get 2009-10 in The Questions Not Asked (PDF, )
• Get all of the first twelve years (2001-2012) in The Collected Issues of Point Lookout (PDF, )

Are you a writer, editor or publisher on deadline? Are you looking for an article that will get people talking and get compliments flying your way? You can have 500-1000 words in your inbox in one hour. License any article from this Web site. More info