Rich irony: 37signals, publisher of Basecamp, the leading web app for project management, ought to know better than anybody that real business planning is a process, not a plan. After all, they do the kind of nuts and bolts management that makes that happen. Instead, however, Matt of 37signals posted the planning fallacy last week:

If you believe 100% in some big upfront advance plan, you’re just lying to yourself.

I object. Who ever said planning was “believing 100% in some big upfront plan?” Good business planning is always a process involving metrics, following up, setting steps, reviewing results, and course correction.

He goes on:

But it,s not just huge organizations and the government that mess up planning. Everyone does. It’s the planning fallacy. We think we can plan, but we can’t. Studies show it doesn’t matter whether you ask people for their realistic best guess or a hoped-for best case scenario. Either way, they give you the best case scenario.

OK that’s a dream, not a plan. Matt seems to confuse the two, but good business planners don’t. Any decent business planning process considers the worst case, risks, and contingencies; and then tracks results and follows up to make course corrections.

Which leads to this, another quote:

It’s true on a big scale and it’s true on a small scale too. We just aren’t good at being realistic. We envision everything going exactly as planned. We never factor in unexpected illnesses, hard drive failures, or other Murphy’s Law-type stuff.

No, but you do allow extra time for the unexpected, and then you follow up, carefully (maybe even using 37 Signals’ software) to check for plan vs. actual results, changes in schedule, new assumptions, and the constant course correction. Murphy was a planner. He understood planning process, plan review, course corrections.

Matt concludes:

That messy planning stage that delays things and prevents you from getting real is, in large part, a waste of time. So skip it. If you really want to know how much time/resources a project will take, start doing it.

Really bad advice there, based on a bad premise. Sure, if you define planning as messy and preventing you from getting real, then it would be a waste of time. But is that planning?

I wonder if Matt takes his own advice. When he travels, does he book flights and hotels? Or does he skip that, and just start walking.