The Terrible Triad

The terrible triad locks in a thinking routine that destroys any glimmers of focused flexiblity on a team or individual.  It gets worse whithout aggressive war like measures.  It grows is stegnth and influence as each element reinforces the other!  Leaders must forcefully attache the harmful tirangle by clearly understanding the enemies of Excessive Planning, Overconfidence and Cognitive Bias.

Excessive Planning  – Proper planning clearly benefits an organziation.  However, few people address teh potential dangers of excessive planning.  Traditionally the managent planning process follows a stand well defined series of steps similar to the following:

• Endpoint objectives are developed
• Gaps between current positions and ojectives are identified
• Action plans, timelines and outcome measure are created to close the gaps and drive forwared desired results.

The process typically works however, in some cases managers will create more uncertainty due to over complicating their quest to create more detail than might be required – remember the old rule, KISS!

Overconfidence – Excessive planning often leads to overconfidence in the ability to control events.

Confirmation Bias – Humans tend to seek out evidence to confirm – not disconfirm,   their preconcieved notions. until you look for evidence to the contrary, you can’t be sure of anything, In short, if you expect a new process to work you can typically find a basis to support th expectation.