Problems With Plans

One person that commented said that he did not do much planning because in his life things quickly changed and his plans went in the toilet quickly. I was reminded of several things about planning I failed to mentioned. Here are some:

• The rule in Combat is that a plan is often good until the first round is fired. The Murphy's law is if the plan is easy, it is wrong. You are either lost or about to be ambushed.
• Plans last longer if they have input from more people and are formulated over a longer time so more input can be incorporated. If you are in a combat unit and enemy is in the wire of your position, you don't call a staff meeting and discuss what to do. Grab your rifles and go shoot the som bitches. On the other hand looking at the factors of Enemy, Terrain, Weather ,time distance and personnel on hand just might be the start of a good plan if you have three hours to plan, give two of those hours to the subordinate to plan how he is going to make your idiot ideas a reality.
• A really good plan poorly executed is often better than a bad plan executed with skill. (Unless the guy is lucky as heck)
• In a lot of cases, trying to figure out what to do as a training exercise will help develop way of doing things that save time, money and lives.
  

The final point is that if you think through what you are going to do you will often find ways that just don't look obvious on the surface. I don't know how many times I worked on something one day and the next day over a cup of coffee the answer would just occur to me. Those are the Ahhhhh! moments as opposed to the Ah Shits when things happen that you didn't think about or expect. MUD