Nobody Can Plan Everything
Big plans fail because no one knows enough; keep things small, spread out and able to fail safely.
One day someone will hand you a big plan. It might be at work, a stack of slides that shows where the company will be in five years, every step drawn in. Or you’ll write one yourself, for your own life: the school, the job, the city, the person, the house, all lined up in order. Plans like that feel safe. They almost never go the way they’re drawn. The people who made them weren’t foolish. They just didn’t know enough, because nobody does.
Here’s a story that shows how little one person can know. In London, a design student named Thomas Thwaites set out to build a toaster from scratch. He bought the cheapest one in the shop and took it apart. It had about four hundred parts, made from more than a hundred kinds of stuff. He hauled iron ore from an old mine. He pulled copper out of the dirty water from another mine, in Wales. He chipped rock off a mountain in Scotland. He couldn’t make plastic from oil, so he melted down old plastic things and poured them into a mold. It took him about nine months. When he plugged it in, the toaster warmed the bread for a few seconds and then started to melt.
The shop had sold him a working one for about four pounds. No one person knows every step of making that toaster. Thousands of people each know one small piece. The miner doesn’t know the plastic, and the plastic maker doesn’t know the wire. Somehow the toaster still ends up on the shelf, and nobody is holding the whole plan.
This is rule two and rule five working together.
First, every plan is a map. The person who draws it can only put down what they can see, and nobody can see the whole world. The planner in the tall office can’t see what the woman at the counter knows about the people who walk in every day. You can’t see, from today, what you’ll know in three years. A plan is a guess about the world, drawn by someone standing in one spot.
Second, since nobody knows enough, the world has to fill in the rest. So the goal is a plan built to let the world answer you often, and cheaply. That comes down to three habits.
Keep it small. Plan the next step in ink and the far steps in pencil. A small step comes back with news fast, and the news tells you how to draw the next one.
Spread it out. Let the people closest to a problem make the calls that only they can see. At work, that’s often the person at the counter, not the one in the tall office. At home, it’s the one who really does the job. They know things you can’t know from where you sit, and a choice spread across many hands doesn’t all go wrong at once.
Make it safe to fail. Before you try something, ask what breaks if it goes wrong. Set it up so the honest answer is “not much.” A failure that can’t take anything else down with it is just news.
This goes for me too. I can’t plan your life from here. I don’t know enough about the world you’ll be living in, and neither does anyone else. That’s why I wrote you rules instead of a plan. Rules travel. Plans get old.
Try this at work or at home in the next week.
Pick one small, safe choice you’d normally make for someone else: how a job gets done, what’s for dinner, which way to drive. Hand it to the person closest to it and ask, “What would you do?” Then let them do it their way, without fixing it. At the end of the week, write down one thing they knew that you didn’t.
One line to remember
Nobody knows enough to plan it all, so plan small and let the world fill in the rest.
