I remember back to my days at the insurance company. One division was planning to replace their primary processing engine, and I was chosen to lead the group planning the project. We met two or three afternoons each week for five or six months. We spent each meeting walking through the structured development methodology's activity definitions and resource templates, laying out detailed task lists for each phase of each subsystem's transformation. The final product was a leveled set of resource plans with each task estimated to at least a 40 hour granularity. We knew before we'd even gathered system requirements, or at least we thought we knew, that the report design tasks in the design phase for the Policyowner Services subsystem, for instance, would take so-and-so many analyst hours, arrayed with this many being junior, that many journeyman, and this other many being senior level work.

We had created "thuddage!" We packaged this information into attractive loose-leaf binders before delivering it to the senior management committee. I remember the tension in the room as these uncharacteristically formal documents were passed around. The tension was quickly dissipated when one of the Senior Vice Presidents turned to the bottom line and reported that he didn't think we should spent this much to do this project. Poof! The six months of crawling through the muck evaporated into meaninglessness. I could have given them as useful a number, which would have been close enough for their purposes, by spending a few minutes on the back of a cocktail napkin with a pencil.

I had made the common and commonly fatal mistake of confusing detail for precision. The two are not related.

As Bronowski reminds us, the game is not won by those who manage to make their senses more sensitive or, by analogy, by those with the most detailed plan. Our planning challenge is more difficult and more subtle than that. How can we get the precision we need given that much of the precision we want is unavailable at the time we need it. How do we deal with the unknown and the unknowable.

My early-in-my-career strategy was to create this detail as a substitute for precision. This seemed like a reasonable way to learn more about an undertaking, although I probably learned a lot more about myself and about my fellows than I ever learned about my projects. Reflecting back, I must have been crazy to believe that by getting eight people together in a room, none of whom had ever seen the system we would build, we could get a useful assessment of how many senior analysts we would need to have on staff in the third quarter three years out. I must have been crazy to spend half my nights following these sessions summarizing these speculations into spreadsheets and rough critical path models, purporting to show roadblocks and shortcuts. Or perhaps I was simply enthralled with my techniques and tools.

Someone in one of my workshops this past spring noted that even though nothing went as planned in the Normandy invasion, the planners still went through the exercise of creating detailed plans. This might seem like an even more useless activity than my thuddage-creating effort, but it was not useless. The purpose was to prepare for the unpreparable, to produce a plan that was plausible although demonstrably incorrect. The real purpose was to learn to work together, the real skill required to succeed in the invasion.

This is a subtle point and in important one. The fact that the situation is filled with uncertainty and unknowables is no excuse for avoiding some detailed planning. These conditions, however, change the meaning of the planning activity and the significance of the resulting plan. The purpose of the planning is not, as I earlier believed, to create certainty but to create the potential for success.

And what do I mean by "create the potential for success?" Success, as human society has understood for centuries, has never relied upon accurate prediction. Humans predict about as well as they fly. The potential for success is created by a community's ability to work together with shared intentions toward a common objective with limited, but not necessarily limiting, resources, in a way that enhances the quality of each individual's experience. This pattern is created in good planning experiences and never present in the resulting plan. The real purpose of the details is not to create "fine discrimination with a course apparatus" but to create a community capable of roughing it.

Each project plan should have a message similar to the "Warning, objects are closer than they appear" printed on your car's passenger-side rear-view mirror. The plan message should read, "Warning, this IS NOT a map of how we'll get there," because it almost never is. Holding this plan as the final arbiter of success will guarantee failure because it chokes off most of the possibilities for success. Where success is defined as this dream coming true, failure is most likely because little of the potential for success can appear in any plan.

No detailed plan allows you to avoid roughing it. Pack everything you think you'll need and you'll still be dogged by some small or significant overlooked detail. The plan will be most useful in getting you started, in pointing you in some initial direction. The planning will tell you most about your potential for success. How easily do you reach agreement? How territorial are you? Can everyone win or must someone compromise, or be compromised, before agreement is reached? Who is us and who is them?

The devil only lurks in the details for those who insist upon him being there. These devilish details become angels when viewed as mediums rather than as ends unto themselves. For those who feel the warm metal of freshly forged leg irons slipping around your ankles as you pitch your latest strategy, check your focus. Each of us must proceed knowing that the details of the pitched plan are wholly inadequate and yet absolutely necessary. The future is at "bottom grainy and course" when viewed from this distance.

One of our clients has an accountability for their project managers to be courageous. I think this is what they must mean. Being a project manager means knowing that the plan can't work while understanding that the project can succeed anyway, on some terms unknowable given our "grainy and course" planning apparatus. Those pursuing certainty with details become wiser or dumber for their encounter with the devils there. Those pursuing potential rough it easier.