What flying taught me about plans

The mission was a 4-ship strike package. We had planned for 3 hours. Briefed for 1. We had walked through it during planning, in the brief, and in our heads as we walked out to the jets.

Before take off things weren't going well. I'd had to change jets with an unserviceability on startup, and I was now behind schedule, frantically making the new aircraft ready in time. Airborne, things didn't get much better. The weather was worse than we'd expected. We were re-routing uncomfortably close to restricted airspace, trying to rebuild the mission at 8 miles a minute.

We still made the strike.

The principle that got us there is the one that took me longest to understand, and it's the one I use most often now in business.

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Eisenhower's line gets reduced to a sound bite, but the full sentence is harder and more useful. The plan dies. The preparation carries you.

In the cockpit, the work of planning did 3 things the plan itself couldn't do.

It trained our judgement. Walking through the contingencies, even ones we never used, was rehearsal for the kind of thinking we'd need when something unexpected happened. When the picture changes at 8 miles a minute, you don't have time to construct judgement from scratch. You have to have already done the thinking.

It built our shared picture. By the time we walked to the jets, all 4 of us saw the mission the same way. The target, the priorities, what we'd protect and what we'd accept losing. That shared picture is what kept the formation flying when the plan started falling apart.

It surfaced our assumptions. Every plan has them. Some are real, some are wishful. You only see them when you're forced to write them down. Half the value of a brief is the assumptions it exposes before you ever get airborne.

The plan itself got binned in the first 12 minutes. The work of planning carried us through the next hour.

This is the part most business plans miss. They are written to be executed, not to train the team that has to execute them. They get filed, referenced quarterly, and protected from challenge. They are treated as the destination rather than the rehearsal.

A good plan should be detailed enough that the people executing it know it cold, and disposable enough that they can throw it away the moment it stops being true.

Three honest tests for whatever plan is sitting on your desk.

Can the team describe the shared picture without the plan in front of them?

Are the assumptions named on the page, or are they buried in the confidence of the people who wrote it?

Has anyone rehearsed the moment when it breaks?

If the answers are uncertain, the plan is doing less work than you think it is.

The plan is the rehearsal.

The plan is not the point.