Rely on Your Plan, not Yourself

Student pilots are taught to rely on their instruments when the airplane is in the clouds and visibility is impaired. Business executives and entrepreneurs, on the other hand, often rely on themselves to make snap judgments and instant changes in strategy. Then have to live with the positive or negative consequences of their action.

Maybe the ego gratification or “wild west” nature of entrepreneurism makes people believe they are so bright, so facile, so “on top of their game” that they can exist outside the constraints and discipline of the planning process… and maybe they can, sometimes. But, if one of those decisions goes bad with no plan in place to help the recovery effort, then a cascading series of snap decisions is made with the hope of recovering, often leading to chaos, crisis, and disaster.

Without a plan in place the entrepreneur is like the airplane pilot who can’t see the ground, not knowing which direction the plane is heading, which way is up or down, with ever diminishing chances that the situation will have a happy landing. In flight school the way a pilot is taught to rely on instruments is to cover the windshield to simulate sightless flying, forcing the pilot to use the instruments. In the business world, the same training process would be to simulate a situation where a decision went bad and the decision maker was hit by the proverbial truck, forcing those left behind to recover by using the plan in place.

It is crucial that the decision maker write out a plan before making any major decision. The plan should have listed the objectives or mission of the initiative, where the money will come from to fund it, the people who will execute it, the timeline of execution, and a method of reevaluation if the project is not headed in the right direction. This way everyone knows where you are going and when you expect to get there so, if you get stuck in the clouds, the business is brought safely back to earth instead of crashing and burning. Happy landings!

Larry Galler coaches and consults with high-performance executives, professionals, and small businesses since 1993. He is the writer of the long-running (every Sunday since November 2001) business column.

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