Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable

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

— Attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of European Allied forces in WWII, later U.S. President

An old military adage asserts that "no plan survives the first contact with the enemy," yet military planning is still taught as an essential skill for leaders in all military organizations.

I'm not convinced that all plans are useless, or that they all fall apart when the action begins, but it's worth asking: If that were true, why would planning have any value at all?

Because the environment will shift. Staff turnover, new technologies, changes in regulations, competition for your audience's attention, all of that and more conspire to derail your plans.

But planning makes you think ahead.

It forces you to define your goals, and the metrics by which you will measure success, and the resources that you have available, and the challenges that you may face, and the methods you will use to achieve your desired outcomes.

If you're doing that, you'll be ready to shift with the changing environment.

Here's the thing:

You can't predict the future. But thinking ahead, in detail, makes you all the more ready to respond to everything that will happen on the way to your goals.

All the best,
A.

P.S. The Eisenhower quotation above is a very popular form of his statement, but the specific phrasing seems to be Richard Nixon’s.