A Seat at the Table

4

PLANNING

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

—Søren Kierkegaard, Journals

Let us not make random conjectures about the greatest matters.

—Heraclitus of Ephesus, Fragments

You cannot be agile while rigidly following a plan. This, I’m sure, is obvious by now. Though we desire agility—who doesn’t, really?—we have difficulty following this simple principle because we have built so many of our IT management practices around following plans. Of course, there are very good reasons we used to think that planning was so important. IT is extremely complex—with so many dependencies to worry about, so many different resources that need to be coordinated, and so large an impact if some minor point is overlooked, it is tempting ...