Planning for Everything Quotes

“The planning process includes at least the following six functions: forming a representation of the problem, choosing a goal, deciding to plan, formulating a plan, executing and monitoring the plan, and learning from the plan.[”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“research by the U.S. Marine Corps revealed “the most successful Marines were those with a strong internal locus of control – a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“The planning process includes at least the following six functions: forming a representation of the problem, choosing a goal, deciding to plan, formulating a plan, executing and monitoring the plan, and learning from the plan.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Planning up front isn’t only about making a plan. It’s about learning, awareness, and practice; so we can identify options, understand feedback, and deal with disruption. Improvisation favors the prepared mind and body.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.” –Jorge Luis Borges”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Let’s say you plan to teach a class on a subject you know well. How do you begin? You might create a syllabus, then prepare lectures for each topic in the outline. But is there a better way? Remember, you enjoy access to information and aren’t limited to trial and error. Perhaps you find a book called Make It Stick about the science of successful learning and encounter another mnemonic, RIGOR, that helps you teach different and better. [71]”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Do you have a fleeting glimpse that may become a goal? How can you make framing more social? There are more ways than stars in the universe. Most require that we also make framing more tangible. For instance, Jeff Bezos has created a culture at Amazon in which “working backwards” is an assumption. For any new initiative, employees begin by writing a press release and FAQ that explain the finished product to the customer. [65] No product is built without conversations and iterations around these tangible artifacts of a customer-centered frame.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“In our pursuit of happiness, we heed the timeless words of management guru Peter Drucker who told us “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” We define key performance indicators (KPIs) and objectives and key results (OKRs) for business. And we use wearable sensors to track steps, calories, insulin levels, and the heart rates of individuals. The numbers keep us so busy, we fail to realize Drucker would never have said those words. The quote is also attributed to W. Edwards Deming, but what he really said is “it is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it –a costly myth.”[”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“As an information architect, framing is a vital part of my work, but it’s not what organizations ask me to do. For example, the National Cancer Institute hired me to fix the usability of their website by reorganizing its navigation. The goal was to reduce the number of clicks from the home page to content. But I soon discovered a bigger problem. Most folks searching for answers about specific types of cancer never reached cancer.gov due to poor findability via Google. I only saw this problem because I knew how to solve it. I explained to my client that by aligning the information architecture with search engine optimization, we could improve usability and findability. Together, we were able to reframe the goals. The site went on to win awards and rise to the top of the American Customer Satisfaction Index.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,”[ 49] he was inviting us to be free.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“In this chapter you may have noticed and perhaps even been irritated by the inconsistent spelling of realise and realize. It’s not a mistake but a subtle gesture to surface a delicate point. Different isn’t wrong. I am British and American, and this book will be read in many countries, so neither spelling is right or wrong. When in doubt, we’re told to pick one and be consistent. But why? Is it to maintain the illusion there’s one right way? Is it because diversity is inefficient? I invite you to ask if some irregularities that irritate may also inform. Why do they cause anger? What do you fear? What might they teach?”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Framing. While common sense suggests we should start to plan by defining goals, it also helps to study the lens through which we see problems and solutions. By examining needs, wants, feelings, and beliefs, we’re better able to know and share our vision and values. Imagining. By expanding our awareness of paths and possibilities, we create choice and inform strategy. We search and research for information, then play with models to stray beyond knowledge. Sketches draw insights that help us add options and refine plans. Narrowing. After diverging, it’s critical to converge by prioritizing paths and options. This requires study of drivers, levers, estimates, and consequences, as the value of a strategy is tied to time and risk. Deciding. While decisions are often made in an instant, the process of committing to and communicating a course of action merits time and attention. Instructions are essential to the rendering of intent. Words matter. So do numbers. Define metrics for success carefully. Executing. The dichotomy between planning and doing is false. In all sorts of contexts, we plan as we travel, build, or get things done. Reflecting. While it helps to ask questions throughout the process, we should also make space to look back at the whole from the end. Long before the invention of time, people used the North Star to find their way in the dark. In the future, I hope you will use these principles and practices to make your way in the world. Figure 1-10. Principles and practices of planning.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Figure 1-9. Four principles. To serve memory and use, I’ve arranged these principles and practices into a mnemonic –STAR FINDER. In astronomy, a “star finder” or planisphere is a map of the night sky used for learning to identify stars and constellations. In this book, it’s a guide for finding goals, finding paths, and finding your way. First, we can get better at planning by making planning more social, tangible, agile, and reflective. At each step in the design of paths and goals, ask how these four principles might help. Social. Plan with people early and often. Engage family, friends, colleagues, customers, stakeholders, and mentors in the process. When we plan together, it’s easier to get started. Also, diversity grows empathy, sharing creates buy-in, and both expand options. Tangible. Get ideas out of your head. Sketches and prototypes let us see, hear, taste, smell, touch, share, and change what we think. When we render our mental models to distributed cognition and iterative design, we realise an intelligence greater than ourselves. Agile. Plan to improvise. Clarify the extent to which the goal, path, and process are fixed or flexible. Be aware of feedback and options. Know both the plan and change must happen. Embrace adventure. Reflective. Question paths, goals, and beliefs. Start and finish with a beginner’s mind. Try experiments to test hypotheses and metrics to spot errors. Use experience and metacognition to grow wisdom.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Principles and Practices The discovery of planful behavior in animals, robots, people, and organizations reveals that planning is a big, messy subject. As we shift from introductory definitions into the book’s core practical chapters, we’ll focus on planning for people. The aim is to help individuals and teams get better at the design of paths and goals. The plan is to build understanding, skills, and literacy by studying four principles and six practices.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“So before working to design the thing right, we must first be sure we’re designing the right thing. This calls for a process of diverging and converging twice. The “Double Diamond” asks us to discover many possible paths and goals before we define the problem and craft the plan; and then to develop and test prototypes before deciding upon and delivering the solution.[ 45] Figure 1-8. The Double Diamond. At the heart of design is our ability to model the world as it is and as it might be. This is powerful. A sketch or prototype can spark insights and change minds. Goals and vision may shift in a “now that I see it” moment. In recent years, business has begun to adapt these practices to strategy and planning under the aegis of Design Thinking. Post-its and prototypes engage our brains, bodies, colleagues, customers, and ecosystems in distributed cognition. Design helps us solve wicked problems by exploring paths and goals. And it works for individuals and teams, not just big business. In short, design is a great fit for planning, and its practices are the inspiration for this book.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Design is how it works.”[”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“The practices and artifacts of Scrum –backlogs, sprints, stand ups, increments, burn charts –reflect an understanding of the need to strike a balance between planning and improvisation, and the value of engaging the entire team in both. As we’ll see later, Agile and Lean ideas can be useful beyond their original ecosystems, but translation must be done mindfully. The history of planning from Taylor to Agile reflects a shift in the zeitgeist –the spirit of the age –from manufacturing to software that affects all aspects of work and life. In business strategy, attention has shifted from formal strategic planning to more collaborative, agile methods. In part, this is due to the clear weakness of static plans as noted by Henry Mintzberg. Plans by their very nature are designed to promote inflexibility. They are meant to establish clear direction, to impose stability on an organization… planning is built around the categories that already exist in the organization.[ 43] But the resistance to plans is also fueled by fashion. In many organizations, the aversion to anything old is palpable. Project managers have burned their Gantt charts. Everything happens emergently in Trello and Slack. And this is not all good. As the pendulum swings out of control, chaos inevitably strikes. In organizations of all shapes and sizes, the failure to fit process to context hurts people and bottom lines. It’s time to realize we can’t not plan, and there is no one best way. Defining and embracing a process is planning, and it’s vital to find your fit. That’s why I believe in planning by design. As a professional practice, design exists across contexts. People design all sorts of objects, systems, services, and experiences. While each type of design has unique tools and methods, the creative process is inspired by commonalities. Designers make ideas tangible so we can see what we think. And as Steve Jobs noted, “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“In recent years, Eric Ries famously adapted Lean to solve the wicked problem of software startups: what if we build something nobody wants?[ 41] He advocates use of a minimum viable product (“ MVP”) as the hub of a Build-Measure-Learn loop that allows for the least expensive experiment. By selling an early version of a product or feature, we can get feedback from customers, not just about how it’s designed, but about what the market actually wants. Lean helps us find the goal. Figure 1-7. The Lean Model. Agile is a similar mindset that arose in response to frustration with the waterfall model in software development. Agilistas argue that while Big Design Up Front may be required in the contexts of manufacturing and construction where it’s costly if not impossible to make changes during or after execution, it makes no sense for software. Since requirements often change and code can be edited, the Agile Manifesto endorses flexibility. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Times of rapid change and increasing complexity require a shift from optimization towards innovation. Forcing workers to blindly execute the upfront plans and sequential processes of the “waterfall model” turns out not to be the one best way. But we do it anyway. Taylor’s obsession with time, order, and efficiency has been absorbed into the fabric of our culture. We share his faith in reductionism. We divide projects into phases into tasks. We separate people into teams into roles. We split work into steps and silos. Then things fall through the cracks. Figure 1-6. The Waterfall Model. It’s not that waterfall is wrong. In many contexts, it’s a useful model. The problem is that, all too often, we apply it without realizing it’s not the only way. Again, it helps to know history. In the 1950s, Toyota figured out how to avoid the pitfalls of Taylorism by embracing what’s now called Lean. In design, all relevant specialists were involved at the outset, so conflicts about resources and priorities were resolved early on. And in production, managers learned that by making small batches and giving every worker the ability to stop the line, they could identify, fix, and prevent errors more quickly and effectively. [40] Rather than serving as cogs in the machine, workers were expected to solve problems by using “the five why’s” to systematically trace every error to its root cause. Similarly, suppliers were expected to coordinate the flow of parts and information within the just-in-time supply system of kanban.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Planning can be fun. If you hate planning, you’re doing it wrong. Plan with a friend, make a map, embrace uncertainty, daydream, and go for a walk. Our ability to imagine, organize, and invent the future is a gift. Shift procrastination into playing with planning.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals