Companies fundamentally believe that their plan of record strategies will work.

  • Companies fundamentally believe that their plan of record strategies will work.
    • Most strategies don't work.
    • They sound plausible, but turn out to not be viable in practice.
    • While deciding which plan to execute, you want more disconfirming evidence, in order to make a better decision.
    • But once a plan is the Official Plan, you move from wanting to find disconfirming evidence to wanting to find no disconfirming evidence.
    • Most disconfirming evidence comes from trying to do the thing and discovering that it's harder than you thought.
    • But any one person who finds that might be blamed by management.
      • Management, hearing the critique of the plan: "Maybe the problem isn't the plan, but the person giving the feedback who is simply not doing a good job executing?"
    • So everyone tries really, really hard to make the plan work if it's possible, even if it's costly.
    • No one wants to be the person who raises their hand to say "I think this plan is impossible to execute" because whoever does that first might get shot.
    • So as a result a large organization shuffles forward like a zombie, attempting in vain to execute a thing that no one but the boss believes could actually work.
    • Organizations can often get stuck in this zombie shuffle!

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