"...plans are useless, but planning is indispensable"

General Dwight D. Eisenhower once stated, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."  Eisenhower certainly knew what he was talking about - he is credited (rightfully) with masterminding Operation Overlord, better known as the invasion of Normandy, France on D-Day (June 6, 1944).  No one but a brilliant strategist and tactician with superb organizational and managerial skills could have possibly orchestrated and supervised combat operations that began with an airborne invasion involving over 1,200 paratroopers, followed by a multi-national amphibious assault involving over 5,000 ships and boats and nearly 160,000 soldiers from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Poland, France, and other forces from the Allied nations of World War II.  The invasion of Normandy set off a chain of events that led to the eventual defeat of Hitler's Nazi Germany and the end of the war in Europe.  I highly recommend the historian Stephen Ambrose's two books, D-Day and Band of Brothers (Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg produced a HBO mini-series based upon "Band of Brothers" - one of my all-time favorites!).

So what exactly did Eisenhower mean?  Did he think that plans were useless?  Absolutely not.  Eisenhower simply meant that if you relied solely on the "plan" (whatever the "plan" involved), you would ultimately fail (for a light-hearted look at this concept, see this movie clip from "Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin" in which Rabbit relies way too much on his map).  Conditions change.  Assumptions prove to be wrong.  In short, by the time that you are ready to execute your "plan", things have changed to the point where you will likely have to change your plans.  In combat, this is known as the "fog of war".    In a sense, Eisenhower is arguing for the high-reliability principle of "deference to expertise".  In essence, decision-making should be pushed down as close to the so-called "sharp end" as possible - front-line leaders and managers are best-positioned to have real-time situation awareness and knowledge of the rapidly changing dynamics of any situation and are therefore in the best position to make the best possible decisions.  I have talked about this before in a previous post, but in the military, "deference to expertise" is also known as "commander's intent" and, in the German army during World War II as "auftragstaktik".

There is more here though.  Eisenhower ALSO said that "planning is indispensable."  In other words, relying solely on plans leads to failure, but failure to plan also leads to failure.  Benjamin Franklin may have said it best, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."  Planning for Operation Overload took place over the span of about 13 months (the decision was made to invade France in May, 1943).  Troops were drilled over and over and over again.  The landing boats practiced amphibious landings over and over and over again.  There was even an elaborate decoy led by General George Patton at an alternative landing location (fake tanks, ships, and planes were massed across the English Channel from France).  Planning was not only "indispensable" - it led to the Allied victory.

The lessons here are two-fold:  Don't rely 100% on your plan.  Don't rely on dumb luck.  There are certainly going to be rare occasions in which individuals don't plan ahead and just get lucky.  My favorite example here is an anecdote that Karl Weick (a leading organizational science authority and one of the early researchers on high-reliability organizations) has shared on a number of occasions.  The story is probably not true, but it is instead based upon a poem called "Brief Thoughts on Maps" written in 1977 by the poet, Miroslav Holub:

The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.

But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end.  And then one of us
found a map in his pocket.  That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.

The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it.  It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees.

Don't rely on the "map" (or "plan"), especially if it's the wrong one.  But regardless, plan ahead.