If You Write the Plan, You’ll Be Fixing It Too

Why the people closest to the work should write the plan, and what to look for when they bring it to you.

In 1987, a heavyweight named Tyrell Biggs said he had a plan to beat Mike Tyson.

Tyson's response: "Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time."

He stopped Biggs in the seventh round.

You probably know the version that stuck, about getting punched in the mouth.

Your team's plans are going to get hit too.

A dependency slips. A customer changes the requirement two weeks before launch. The approach that looked clean on the whiteboard runs into the real codebase.

Then the plan has to adapt, fast, and somebody has to make the call.

Who wrote the plan decides how that goes.

When you hand them the steps

Say you've been leading a team for a couple of months. A big initiative is coming. You know exactly how you'd run it, so you write the plan and hand it over. Step one, step two, step three.

Your team can follow those steps. What they don't have is the reasoning behind them.

So when step three runs into something nobody saw coming, the only safe option is to stop and come back to you.

Now the work waits on you. The replanning lands on your desk, on top of everything already there. And the people closest to the problem, closest to the customer, closest to the code, stand by while someone further from the work decides what happens next.

That wastes the intelligence of the people on your team. You're not letting them think for themselves.

When your plan breaks, the team has an easy explanation ready: it was your plan. The natural next step is to hand it back to you to fix.

When they write it

Now flip it.

The team writes the plan. They know every step, because they wrote it. When something unforeseen hits, they understand the plan well enough to adapt it on the spot.

They also want it to work. It's their plan. They are deeply vested in the success of their plan.

And they may have a better answer than you would. They're doing the work every day. When an obstacle shows up, they're usually the first to see it, and often well equipped to get around it.

There's a benefit before anything breaks, too.

People get stressed and worried when they have no control over what's happening to them, or over what they're being asked to do. Give them the power to decide how they'll accomplish the mission, and a lot of that worry goes away. Confidence goes up. So does their sense of ownership and accountability for the work.

What you give them first

You still own the strategy and the outcome. Before the team writes anything, they need four things from you.

1. The outcome you expect. What done looks like, how you'll measure it, and when you need it.

2. The why. The reason this work matters to the business.

3. Your perspective on the situation. What you can see from your seat that they can't see from theirs.

4. Resources and constraints. What's available to them, and the lines they need to stay inside.

Then ask them to write the plan and bring it to you for review before they take action.

What you're looking for in the review

You'll have a picture in your head of the perfect plan. Call it your 100% plan.

When their plan comes back, you're looking for 80% of that. At 80%, it's a go.

Remember, your 100% plan was going to get hit too. And the whole point is to execute their plan, so they own it. If it's close to what you had in mind, say yes.

What if someone on your team brings you a plan that's closer to 30%?

You don't approve it. You also don't toss it out and hand them yours.

Start with yourself. Go back to that list of four. Was the outcome clear? Did I give them enough context and perspective? Did they know what resources were available and which constraints mattered?

If you gave them all four and the plan is still weak, they may need help learning to build a better plan. That's a coaching opportunity. Work with them until it reaches 80%.

Then it's a go. You helped them build their plan, and now you support it. It's still theirs.

Every plan your team writes is going to hit something nobody saw coming.

When it does, you want the people standing closest to the problem to be the ones empowered and capable of fixing it. 

Best,

Jeff

P.S. If you've taken over a team that brings every broken plan back to your desk, let's talk. Book a Strategy Session and we'll look at what your team needs from you to write plans they'll own, and adapt when things go sideways. You will meet directly with me. Here's a link to my calendar.