Rush to Wrong

In the world of strategy, planning, analysis and performance, there's a real balance to be struck between planning and action.   Sometimes this can be simple enough, especially in short term and reactive situations.

My favourite example here is generating parliamentary answers to parliamentary questions - with the red flag clipped to the wallet "Ministerial - Immediate at all stages".  But as scale increases, and where there is more choice, then that balance needs to be more sensitively managed.



There are two ends of that action-planning spectrum.....

Rush to Wrong.  Without sufficient planning then action can be wasted, even contradictory or counter-productive.  In a desire to do something and get busy, that might end up being "wrong busy".  That may take us further from our objective and makes things more difficult or longer to subsequently achieve.  If we're looking for the buried treasure, it's digging in the wrong place (ineffective) or with the wrong tools (inefficient)

Paralysis by Analysis.  With to much planning there is a risk of over-analysis.  Elapsed time can take a real toll.   There's the now immortal quote...."Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough" (Mark Zuckerberg).  That would rather assume that it's right things that are being broken.

So the challenge is to get the balance between those two extremes just right for the context.