In our book S&T Happens we talked about the shrinking distance ahead that organisations can see – how planning increasingly becomes waste. A recent CIO.com article supports that, talking about the impact on IT roadmaps.
It says:
CIOs now lean on shorter-term, more flexible plans, saying there’s too many unknowns to plot IT strategies years ahead… the rapid pace of tech advancements and disruptive market shifts has prompted some CIOs… to abandon the practice. They say it’s not worth mapping out a three-year plan when a transformative new technology could emerge seemingly overnight… they’re finding that a reworked, and oftentimes shorter, roadmap is the way to steer their department forward… Kellie Romack, chief digital information officer of ServiceNow, is also shortening her horizon to align with the two- or three-year timeframe that is the norm for her company. Doing so keeps her focused on supporting the company’s overall future strategy but with enough flexibility to adjust along the journey.
We said in our book:
To survive and thrive, we do much less conventional planning – what we are going to do, when we are going to do it by, and what will be the measurable outcomes – and more Open Planning.
In a conventional world, we plan short, medium, and long term. VUCA drives a wedge of uncertainty between the short and long term. The more VUCA the world, the wider the gap, so the shorter the short-term planning and the further out the long-term. At Teal Unicorn, pre-cancer-and-COVID we were planning the next year and visioning 2-3 years out. Now we plan only the next 1-3 months, and envision 3-5 years away.
So don’t overinvest. Do Open Planning. Plan enough to do just enough to learn enough to revise (or invalidate) the plan. Continue/adjust/abandon/pivot on every iteration. Do minimum viable planning: outcome or goal-based roadmaps, not feature-based roadmaps; stories fleshed out just in time; decisions and work deferred as long as reasonable.
(Author’s note: So many people have told me that this graphic is too ugly, that I’m now keeping it just to be pig-headed.)
We can do conventional planning for as many cycles into the future as we can reasonably foresee, the Foreseeable. “Cycles” might be “n” weeks or months or quarters, depending on context, where n is a very small integer. There is a reason why quarterly planning is becoming more popular, rather than annual. And why Scrum is increasingly popular, replanning work on a cadence measured in weeks.
TU uses the analogy of driving on a highway in fog. How far ahead in time you can see, measured in seconds, is a function of (a) how fast you are going (b) how thick the fog is and (c) how good your headlights are.