Use planning to:

• Coordinate decisions that cannot be adequately coordinated another way
• Level and optimize resources
• Generate shared situational awareness and expectations
• Communicate thinking of executives and planners
• Form mental and physical models for how to execute the project
• Develop and support intuition; the learning benefits of performing planning can be more valuable than the resulting plan
• Create opportunities to act with initiative
• Identify actions that could advance strategic goals
• Reconcile schedule-driven resources planning with the event-driven operational needs
• Think through multiple different time horizons
• Deciding what important, what is not, and where the boundaries lie is fundamental to effective planning

Determine how much planning to do

• Use more prescriptive planning when teams are inexperienced
• Use more goal-oriented planning with experienced teams
• Decrease detail and extend planning horizon at higher levels
• Increase detail and integration when certainty is high
• Simplicity is better when there are many alternatives and possibilities
• Plans can be more complex when alternatives and possibilities are few
• Increase modularity and decentralization when uncertainty is high and coordination is difficult
• View planning as evolving continuously and iteratively as time and circumstances allow; plan, replan, and plan again
• A reasonable plan executed quickly and aggressively is better than an optimal plan executed too late
• Use defined budgets and timelines to limit plan complexity

Plan for risk

• Identify the probability and impact of risks occurring
• Bias towards optimism and exploration to accelerate learning
• Risk = threat x venerability, Opportunity = option x capability
• Without data, scenario development (and subsequent risk identification) depends on opinion and analogy
• Risk analysis means little without adequate scenario development
• Broaden the range of possibilities; “things that never happened before, happen all the time”
• Lengthen time frames; near term risks can represent long term opportunities
• Maintain multiple paths and options until empirical data can be used to narrow the focus
• Communicate in terms of frequencies rather than single-event probabilities
• Address risks on both absolute and relative levels
• Sometimes a good plan seeks to avoid bad outcomes rather than achieve optimal outcomes
• Prioritize creating options over a single “perfect” plan
• Increase caution, delay, and search for alternatives when environmental damage is possible
• Mitigate high probability, low impact risks
• Transfer low probability, high impact risks to another party
• Avoid and reduce high probability, high impact risks
• Limit the downside when taking risks
• De-risk assumptions that are necessary for success first
• Assess the gap between targets and what can reasonably be delivered
• Be pessimistic during risk assessment, optimistic during execution
• Increase resilience with slack and margin allocations
• Closely link planners and executors
• Identify who will be impacted if risks occur
• Resist quick convergence on a solution with high uncertainty or long lead times