from Hacker News

Planning is for doing

by lilfrost on 6/4/22, 9:56 PM with 59 comments

by ElevenLathe on 6/4/22, 11:30 PM
I work in crisis management, sometimes on tense, hours-long outage calls. Very often, engineers or others on the call will say things like "It would be nice to run test $x before we move forward."
It basically always pays to ask a counter-question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?"
Often the answer is no, so we can skip doing the test and get to remediation faster.
Once you notice this pattern (it's clearer in outage situations where moments matter), you frequently catch people (including yourself, if you're honest) seeking information that they don't even /plan/ to use as an input to some decision or action. In other words, there is no conceivable future where the answer to some proposed question would have an effect on their actions. If you find such a situation, you can at minimum remove answering that question from the critical path, and possibly just never bother finding the answer at all.
That doesn't mean that having such information is bad, just that we should think of the cost of gathering suit against its likelihood of mattering in terms of our actions. In fact, possibly one of the central purposes of IT broadly is to lower the cost of answering such questions, so that we can afford to ask more of them.
by mjr00 on 6/5/22, 12:05 AM
> Finally, the third, and most pernicious situation in which there is too much planning is when planning becomes its own end. This can happen because individuals in organizations get more reward for planning work than actually executing on it. It might be seen that the execution is the “easy part”, and can be done by anyone, whereas the grand visionary (or “architect”) is the real cause of success.
I've experienced this happening due to an influx of people into an organization who simply can't execute -- middle managers come in with impressive resumes but little understanding of the problems that need to be solved. When results aren't delivered, they default to extensive planning processes because it creates an appearance of work. There's lots of tangible outputs (market studies, reams of wiki pages and documentation that are written, fancy slide decks, plenty of presentations...) yet nothing that provides actual value to customers. They know execution is the hard part, they just can't do it, so they stay in planning mode endlessly in order to provide an illusion of productivity, and to keep their job.
by DoreenMichele on 6/5/22, 12:46 AM
A couple of things this makes me think of:
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
It's a military saying but I think it applies equally to business. I think that's the whole point of rubrics about how much you need to talk to customers.
When seconds count, the police are minutes away.
Said by pro gun people. I'm of mixed feelings about that but I still like the saying very much to encapsulate an idea about making hard decisions in critical situations when time is of the essence. It's similar to the military saying Sometimes, a 90 percent solution now is better than a 100 percent solution later.
by anotherevan on 6/5/22, 1:56 AM
The driving parable reminded me of my one and only time driving in the USA. The thing that absolutely did my head in was the intersections with four-way stop signs. There was no clear indication of who had right of way which I would have thought would cause a lot of collisions. It just seemed like the biggest bully goes first.
Give me roundabouts any day.
by navane on 6/5/22, 9:36 AM
"None of these take into account the needs of the drivers, so should characterize them as unjust. For example, one driver might be late to catch their flight (costing them hundreds of dollars), while another might be on a leisurely cruise around town with no particular destination."
I don't know how to put this into words, but I hate that "doing nothing" is equated by being worth less, or less urgent, or having less rights. Your emergency is not my urgency, or something along those lines. If I choose to live slow leisurely, I shouldn't loose any rights over it.
by closeparen on 6/5/22, 8:18 PM
My organization has this disease bad. It’s awful. It’s so ingrained that our official leveling competencies stop recognizing differences in execution skills (coding, debugging, etc) after 2-4 years into a career. All growth from there on out is planning, design, vision, influence, leadership.
This design might have made sense in a world with voracious hiring of junior talent to do the execution. But hiring has slowed and had shifted towards more senior roles even before it slowed. So we are awash in grand plans and perpetually short of resources to execute them. Those who do get stuck executing plans are of lower than average skill, since the competent implementers are promoted to planning. So even if you can get resources for your grand plan, chances are it will be executed badly.
by guiriduro on 6/4/22, 11:20 PM
The author thinks the parable they heard concerning silly traffic priority negotiation would be too horribly impractical to occur in real life; but they clearly have never been on a winding (mostly) single lane coastal road in Southern Italy, e.g. Amalfi. Silly and impractical negotiation between drivers is exactly how it works, or rather, doesn't. Although in this case it manifests the complete absence of planning rather than too much (the point of the article), because nobody sane would plan to allow tourist busses to travel bi-directionally on a geographically-constrained winding road that barely enables small cars to pass two abrest in many places.
by ChrisMarshallNY on 6/5/22, 1:22 AM
I’ve developed a way of working, where I start with a “rough napkin sketch,” and begin writing, quite early[0]. I also try to get a high-quality (but incomplete) working prototype available as quickly as possible.
A very important part of my process is the “don’t try this at home, kids” part. It requires a great deal of architectural and implementation experience. Lots of scars and a pronounced limp.
If I describe this to folks, they tend to freak out, but it works on my machine…
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/forensic-design-docu...
by wellpast on 6/5/22, 7:28 AM
What is the name for the fallacy in which you make an analogy that does not reflect the real-world territory at all, and then draw a conclusion from it?
“Doing” is not at all enough. (Well, it shouldn’t be.)
Peer into any random engineering org and you’ll inevitably find loads of engineers driving around in circles with the wind in their hair, smiling with a sense of how “fast” and productively they’re moving!
by matesz on 6/5/22, 8:32 AM
This issue is discussed by Donald Knuth in one of his interviews [1].
"I know that every large project has some things that are much less fun than others; so I can get through the tedium, the sweeping or whatever else needs to be done. I just do it and get it over with, instead of wasting time figuring out how not to do it. I learned that from my parents. My mother is amazing to watch because she doesn't do anything efficiently, really: She puts about three times as much energy as necessary into everything she does. But she never spends any time wondering what to do next or how to optimize anything; she just keeps working. Her strategy, slightly simplified, is, "See something that needs to be done and do it." All day long. And at the end of the day, she's accomplished a huge amount." - Donald Knuth
[1] https://shuvomoy.github.io/blogs/posts/Knuth-on-work-habits-....
[2] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/d/d5/optimization.pn...
by erikpukinskis on 6/5/22, 6:58 AM
The author is suggesting replacing a bad plan (everyone discuss each intersection) with another bad plan (just drive however you like).
(And as an aside, stopping at each intersection to discuss is not ideal, but at least no one is going to die.)
Anyway, I’m unconvinced. Most of the planning failures I’ve seen came about because people were bad at planning, not because they were talking too much. I’ve seen the opposite (not enough talking, not enough looking ahead) far more often.
I do like the slogan though. Planning is for doing.
by DeathArrow on 6/5/22, 6:37 AM
>The common way of determining right of way on roads is some combination of right of way, stop signs, and traffic lights. None of these take into account the needs of the drivers, so should characterize them as unjust.
In modern societies having equal rights is 'unjust'.
by teekert on 6/5/22, 11:12 AM
“The system in the parable is clearly more just”
Only if you believe “need” should trump all other considerations. One can argue whether that is the way. I’d say it’s quite an assumption to build on.
by Archelaos on 6/5/22, 12:18 AM
The William James quotation at the end should not be presented as a single one. An ellipses should only be used if they were from the same paragraph. Actually, the two parts are from distinct passages several sections appart.
by 12thwonder on 6/5/22, 7:12 AM
good article. my questions now is how can we avoid over-plannings and under-plannings?
a lot of time I feel like the diminishing return of a planning is pretty steep for many situations but it's hard to tell how much time we should spend for the planning beforehand. (this is a planning for planning and maybe this itself is over-planning lol).
by agumonkey on 6/5/22, 2:28 PM
Most of the time planning means "exploring" here lies the issue.
by pqwEfkvjs on 6/5/22, 8:45 AM
Don't think, just execute