When faced with a problem, we usually assume The Answer exists out there somewhere, and that our main difficulty lies in finding it. We believe that if we just think through the problem enough - or indeed, sit with and feel through it enough, or ask enough experts - The Answer that solves the problem will be found. But The Answer is a mirage: it doesn’t exist, and can’t be found, no matter how hard we try.
By The Answer, I of course don’t mean any answer. I mean the idea that there is a best answer. A superlative one. I mean the idea that we can sit, feel, think, discuss and research our way to a true view of events and context, and thereby find The Answer to the problem. One that we can draw a box around and put in The Plan, and which - because is The capital-A Answer - we can be reasonably sure will be effective.
In our personal lives, I think we all understand intuitively that this isn’t really the case. We know that there’s a category of decisions we have to make where no amount of due diligence can give us a right and true answer, or a plan that we can depend on to shape the future in a particular way. Should I take that job? Should I study economics? Should I marry this person? Should I become a parent?
In such situations, we may very well have feelings or discover facts that preclude one decision or another: insights that disqualify a particular path. Perhaps the job doesn’t pay enough. Perhaps your current partner would make a terrible parent. Perhaps you have a burning dislike for economics. But absent these sorts of things, there’s nothing that operates in the opposite direction. There’s nothing that can assure you that you positively should make the leap of faith you’re facing. That’s why they’re so named.
At work, this dynamic is less intuitive. We operate with much higher expectations for the usefulness of analysis, planning, consideration of risk and so on - in the expectation that they can give us The Answer. But there’s no right answer to be found there either. The planning can be useful, but we should recognise it for what it is: a diligent hunt for disqualifying facts and revealing feelings1. If The Answer doesn’t exist to be found, the best you can do is eliminate the ones that are definitely bad.
But this is not how most organisations operate. Generally, an organisation’s model of the world demands that its leadership look for The Answer, and on finding it, render it into The Plan. There’s nothing wrong with making a plan, but there’s a lot wrong with making The capital-P Plan. One which, as Oliver Burkeman writes, is mistaken for more than it really is:
We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is - all it can ever possibly be - is a present-moment statement of intent.
Burkeman writes about this in Four Thousand Weeks in the context of our personal lives and aspirations, but it’s equally true in a professional context. At work we tend to make our plans more detailed and better researched, but that doesn’t necessarily make them more effective - often just longer and more expensive.
If we believe our plans to have this force that they cannot have - the ability to coerce the future into compliance with our wishes - we set ourselves up for failure from the outset. We set in stone The Answer and The Plan against which the thing we are doing will be judged. But The Answer doesn’t really exist. By that impossible standard, the ideas we chisel into the stone will always be wrong. So The Plan will be too, as will be the thing we ultimately do. Depending on your perspective, it will be wrong either because we followed the plan and did the wrong thing, or because we didn’t, and so didn’t do the planned thing.
Of course, it’s entirely normal for people to avoid this trap. Often The Plan outlives its usefulness, becoming dated and inapplicable, and so it just falls away. Or The Plan is continuously updated. Or a “reset” happens and The Plan is scrapped, and replaced. Each of which is extra work, often carried out at substantial expense and for limited gain.
But this is not inevitable. We don’t have to pretend that The Answer exists. We don’t have to live with the conception of The Plan as something that can coerce the future into a particular shape. We can explicitly frame our plans as the thing that they actually are when you acknowledge their limitations: present-moment statements of intent.
In so doing, we create the expectation that they’ll change. We create the space to be flexible, to iterate, to understand, to update our intentions based on what we learn by doing. We create the freedom to unlock commitments of money and time in sensible units, aligned with our growing understanding of risk and opportunity. We can avoid time-consuming governance theatre and instead be more connected to the work, the needs we’re meeting, the people we’re serving, and the outcomes we want to achieve.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t think things through carefully, especially when that’s what the problem at hand calls for. If you’re building a bridge, you need to do your sums, and make sure they’re right. But we must break free of the idea that all problems have that same character. We can recognise that at work, as in our personal lives, many of the big decisions we face are also leaps of faith with no superlative answer. Should we invest in this, or that? Hire the all-important first employee, or not? Cut this service line, or establish a new one? Move into this new market or double down on the one we’re in?
These sorts of questions are important, and we must do the work to understand them. We should satisfy ourselves that we’re not about to make some sort of unforced error, or make a decision based on an identifiably incorrect assumption, or reflexively based on our feelings about something.
But after a proportionately diligent hunt for those disqualifying facts and feelings, we should lean into the idea that the particular decision we make is usually less important than the timeliness with which it is made, the clarity with which it is held and communicated, the values that guide our behaviour, and the energy and attention that we bring to its implementation - and, when circumstance demands, to changing our course.
Noticing these feelings, rationalising them and communicating them usefully to others is a valuable and generally under-appreciated skill.