AND YOU THINK YOU CAN PLAN?

Most people do. Most organizations think they can. It’s a human tendency. We think we are fully competent to plan for things of the future. When I lived half the year in Australia, I visited the famous Sydney Opera House on numerous occasions. That led me to became acquainted with some of the facts about it. When it was first planned, the designers estimated that it would cost $7 million and would be completed in 1963. It was not. It cost $102 million and was not completed until 10 years later, in 1973. Oops. Someone mis-calculated!

Then two decades ago, here in Colorado, the new Denver International Airport opened. But it was 16 months late in opening and worse than that, the planning that estimated the cost went over-budge by $2 billion dollars— that billion with a b. That was a big Oops! More mis- calculations. And such mis-calculations seem to be built into our basic thinking patterns.

In NLP, Neuro-Semantics, and Meta-Coaching I regularly see and experience this planning fallacy. It doesn’t just happen ever-now-and-then, it happens nearly all the time. Because we use the NLP Well-Formed Outcome pattern so frequently, we are constantly dealing with the human capacity (or incapacity) for effectively planning and estimating costs, time-frames, and effort.

This becomes obvious when we ask question #4, “When do you realistically think you can achieve this objective?” When we ask question #7, “What do you have to do to achieve your outcome?” Question #14, “What could stop you or interfere with you achieving this goal?” Question #16, “Is reaching this objective ecological?”

The Planning Fallacy is a common cognitive fallacy and one that’s been researched, described, and explained in multiple books. It is driven, in part, by the Understanding Bias— we think we understand things when actually we do not understand— what’s involved, how much time things take, how much effort and how many resources will be required. It is further driven by the Availability Bias inasmuch we plan things based almost solely on what we know without even taking consideration that there are and will be multiple things we don’t know.

Then there is the Confirmation Bias that further complicates things given how our beliefs and inputting of information as well as our processing of information tends to be biased by what we already believe and expect. All of these distorted and biased ways of thinking seriously undermine our ability to effectively and realistically plan things.

The fact is that planning, estimating how long things will take, how much they will cost, what it will involve in terms of effort and discipline, all of the things that could interfere, and creating an effective and actionable plan is much more difficult than imagined. To check this out in your own life, pull out your list of goals that you intended to achieve in 2019 and the time-frame that

you set on those items. Then examine how long it did take (or is still taking) to achieve.

There is a structure and a strategy to effective planning. The delusion is thinking that it is easy and natural. It is not. That’s one reason the eighteen questions in the Well-Formed Pattern provides such a powerful tool, and why it takes skill to be able to use those questions effectively. That’s also the reason why the Decision Conversation in the Axes of Change Model further provides a way to think through a decision before jumping in.

Effective planning inevitably also involves systems thinking because whatever you are planning occurs in a system and that system is also within yet other systems. For that reason there are inevitably systemic factors, contributing factors, and systemic effects that need to be brought into consideration as you plan. The good news is that we have lots of tools in Neuro-Semantic NLP that can enable your very capability for effective planning. More about that in the coming posts.