As much as this advice might make sense for creative work (and I really don’t know if it’s true or not) it’s decidedly not true for more concrete fields involving complex interactions between principles.

Or, put another, would you like the pilots on your next trans-atlantic flight to say ‘fuck the planning’ and throw out the flight plan, pre-flight checks and flight crew prep? Of course you would not. Somewhere between slavish adherence to checklist/process and ‘fuck the plan’ lies, methinks, the truth…

I think some of the bad parts of planning are listed in the article and they are to be avoided. But some of the good parts of planning are not: especially co-ordination amongst a group of individuals, each of whom has a critical role to play in a complex interplay of tasks. Sure, if you have a single thing to do, do it. If you have a thing to do with another person, the ‘planning’ can take the form of a quick face to face. Then do it. But if you are building, for example, complex software with anything more than two developers, and a single qa developer… ya need to plan.

If you are managing a team of 25 people, each with their own tasks (and plans), some interacting with each other and with other teams you don’t manage, then you need to plan on when and how you will interact with them for progress, troubleshooting and running interference, so as not to disrupt their work while still managing them. This is called ‘effective management.’

And you need to plan for the plan to be inadequate. Doers aren’t the people who do things without plans, doers are the ones working the plan until it doesn’t work and adapting on it, get shit done.