What do you do when your best plans are laid bare?

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth," Mike Tyson famously said when asked if he was worried about his opponent Evander Holyfield's fight plan for their upcoming boxing bout. In a very different context, that of the battlefield, Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Molke offered a similar viewpoint in 1880, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”.

Do the quotes above imply that we can plan as much as we want, but everything gets tossed out when unexpected, adverse conditions appear in a “fight” – whether in the boxing ring, a battlefield, or a business context? Do plans have limited value, and aren’t really needed; perhaps what is more important is how people handle themselves in these situations.

Have you had a similar feeling when your business / work / life / finances have been disrupted by a nexus of geopolitical and global forces: a pandemic, crashing stock market, oil price war, and an economy that seems to be heading towards a recession? And all this happened despite you having defined plans that seemed to work in the past.

What happened now?

Most plans get created with a rational mindset in a bounded set of scenarios. The real-world may throw surprises at us! Our competition may not choose to operate with the same set of rationality, and worse, may deliberately take extreme / seemingly irrational positions. In fact, their reaction may bend Newton’s third law of motion: for each of our actions, their reactions may not be equal and opposite, but be much stronger. Or there could be exogenous shocks (pandemic, financial collapse / recession, wars, etc.) that impact our plans. These shocks may be so big that we feel powerless in our response.

So, what makes a plan weak? Some of the issues are:

1.     They are good on paper: Most of the plans are just that, plans. They haven’t been run through enough real-life simulations to pressure test them, find their weaknesses, and refine them. They crumble when their ideal what-if scenarios are breached.

2.     They lack resilience: Many plans are not able to respond to the changing external and internal situations, and adapt to the “new normal”.

3.     They are reactive: Playing against numerous forces (competitors, etc.) in a fast-paced scenario doesn’t allow for complacent plans, or just being reactionary to others’ moves.

It is not the adversity that defines us, but how we react to it. Some suggestions in responding to a disruption include: 

1.     Make better plans: If Plan A hasn’t worked, adapt, and put in a Plan B. Or a Plan C. Heck, there are 23 more letters in the English alphabet!

2.     Make your plans better: Incorporate key elements in your plans that make them better: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, response rate, recovery mechanisms. Battle-test your plans. Review, refine, iterate.

3.     Change the game: Determine what you can do differently. Find your counter punch.

What will you do?