When Others Resist Planning

Do you encounter naysayers who resist the idea of taking time to develop a plan before starting a project?

One challenge is that often resistance to planning isn’t direct. It tends to come in the form of people just trying to get project work started, either ignoring our requests as project managers to participate in a thoughtful planning process, or simply trying to start things without informing us that something is happening at all.

Many times, for me, initiating a project has felt like chasing a train that’s already moving down the tracks, forcing my way up to the engine room, and asking important questions of the conductor that nobody has thought to ask yet.

As my favorite project management book (How Big Things Get Done) says, people tend to do this because they are anxious to see progress, and in their minds, progress looks like execution, not planning.

But the beauty of the right amount of planning is that it can reduce the total time spent on the project—planning and execution combined—compared with a project that begins with execution on the first plausible idea, but later needs to back-track when problems arise. It can also create improvements with respect to other project constraints (less money spent, higher quality result, etc.) when multiple approaches are considered and explored during a planning process.

This is largely why we have a job and a field, and this is one of our causes to champion.

So how exactly do we champion this cause when we encounter planning resistance? I can recommend three basic options.

1. Give their approach a chance.

I know I just said project managers need to be champions of planning. But sometimes you’re working with a planning-resistor who will be hard to convince, and you may not have built enough trust yet for them to give your advice the time of day. In this scenario, sometimes your fastest route to convince them will be to go along with their low-planning approach, let them watch it fail or be difficult, and then use the opportunity of their openness to alternatives afterward to pitch more planning next time. Of course their approach will not always fail or have problems, but on a project with even a little complexity, it is likely.

Assuming things go the way you expect, be careful not to rub it in or say anything that effectively sounds like “I told you so.” The point here is not for you to be proven right or get an ego boost. The point is for the experience to be a part of the “conversation” that gets this person or people onboard with spending enough time on planning next time. You’ve taken a step toward building trust by giving their approach a chance. Having been extended that courtesy, they are more likely to extend it to you in return—and now you have the opportunity to champion your cause. You also have a trusting relationship in the making.

I hope you can sense that this approach is more appropriate on a lower-stakes project. On a higher-stakes project, if you’re having a hard time getting one key stakeholder to slow down and plan, it is likely worth your time and effort to try to convince another senior leader at your company of the need for more planning and get their assistance making time for it on your project.

2. Explain the value of a plan for THIS project.

When you do take the approach of directly trying to convince someone that spending more time on planning is worthwhile, I recommend you make it about the specific value of planning for the project at hand, rather than for projects in general. What specific project outcomes do you think better planning will make possible, or make better, and why?

For example, if we need a vendor to help with a project, we could quote with one vendor and start moving. But if we take a little more time to quote with multiple vendors, we have the opportunity to get a better price and/or pick the vendor who seems to understand our needs best. We might also learn a little more about what we’re really asking for, and we can learn that before we’ve committed any money to anybody. If any of those things, or those things in aggregate, are of more value to your team and company than the extra time it will take, then spending this extra time on the planning process will be the obvious choice.

If the discussion stays at a high level about the general merits of planning more vs. less, it is more likely to feel like an argument about personal preferences, turn into a personal argument, and cause hurt feelings. But if you keep the focus on specific project outcomes and the best way to achieve them, you can diffuse or avoid most of these issues.

Furthermore, if you have multiple conversations like this over time about how appropriate planning can facilitate the best specific results on the project at hand, your naysayers will likely start to infer the pattern on their own and you won’t have to work so hard to convince them.

3. Consider agile planning methods.

Sometimes when people resist planning, their problem is with detailed “waterfall” or predictive-style planning, where everything is planned in great detail before any work begins. They have a sense that this type of planning is a waste of time. This is good, because for some projects it is! But they may not realize there is another option.

Agile methods also include planning, but in a just-enough, just-in-time way. At the beginning of an agile project, you plan the project itself at a high level, and you also determine what your process will be for adding more detail to the plan as you go. This approach is designed to keep things organized in a situation with a lot of unknowns or when a lot of change is expected in the company or the market before the project is over.

Some planning resistors just need to be shown that this option exists. If you’re new to agile methods, do some basic research on the options (maybe via a conversation with an AI chatbot) and cast a vision for this naysayer of how this alternate approach to planning could look on the project at hand. They may breathe a sigh of relief that you’ve addressed their concerns about over-planning when everything could change, and you can breathe a sigh of relief that you’ve still achieved buy-in on a planning process.

Here's one more idea you can bring up when somebody’s resistance to planning is “everything is going to change anyway”: when you’ve taken the time to plan—to clarify what you’re going to do on the project, how, and why—the process of adjusting the plan to a specific change is likely to be much faster. Clarity of thinking on why you were headed in one direction given one set of conditions can lend itself to clarity on what adjustments make sense given a new set of conditions. It may take a bit longer to get moving, but once you’re moving, it will be easier to keep up the momentum.

These are my top 3 responses to people who resist planning. These people are not malevolent; they have good intentions. They’re just working on misguided information or instincts. And I find the approaches above to be the most effective ways to close those gaps for them in a kind, relational, human-centered way.