In our book S&T Happens we talked about the shrinking distance ahead that organisations can see – how planning increasingly becomes waste. 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.
How we plan could be anything from Toyota Improvement Kata to Scaled Agile Framework. TU likes using big-room days – what we call Community Collaboration – to plan an iteration. We use Open Space Technology or our own patterns for the ritual.
Start where you are. Get a deeper understanding of how your value network actually works.