The saying "Man plans, and God laughs" reflects the difficulties in taking all the uncertainties into account as we try to fulfil our ambitions.
No matter at work or at home, the best-laid plans frequently go sideways for reasons that, in hindsight, often seem obvious.
The costs of poor planning can be enormous.
A review of 258 transport projects globally revealed that actual costs were on average 28% higher than planned costs, with some projects experiencing cost overruns as high as 65%.
At a personal level, we can also struggle with poor planning, especially when it comes to finances. Individuals with shorter financial planning horizons had a 9 percent greater risk of dying over 10 years in England and a 7 percent greater risk over 22 years in the U.S., a recent study found.
Plans can go awry for many reasons, but there are some common psychological challenges behind what seems like a chronic issue.
The main challenge is what is known as temporal myopia, or short-sightedness when it comes to time. We can see what's in front of us very clearly, and can easily imagine what the world might look like tomorrow. But the further into the future we get, the harder it is to imagine.
This causes a couple of problems.
First, by default we assume the world will look pretty much like it does today. In other words, your plan will fail to build in the flexibility needed to accommodate a dynamic situation.
Second, it means that your plan becomes fuzzier and less detailed the further into the future you get. In some cases, it might make sense to "wait and see what happens," but usually your plans will get off-track because of unexpected surprises you should have expected.
The solution to temporal myopia is to focus your imagination on the more distant future and then work back to today. This process is known as backcasting, and it balances out the robustness of your plan by applying more effort to the difficult later stages instead of the easier initial stages.
It works like this:
Set a goal and target time.
Divide the time between then and now into equal parts to create four to six milestones.
Detail what it's like when you've accomplished your goal.
Then move back in time one milestone and answer the question: To achieve my goal, what would have to be true at this milestone?
Then move back one milestone and answer: To reach the next milestone, what has to be true at this milestone?
Keep moving back milestone by milestone until you get back to the present.
Now play the plan forward to see if it makes sense and is feasible.
The more details you put into every step of the plan, the more robust it will be.
For example, you may want to write a novel and publish it in 18 months. 18 months seems like a long time, right?
18 months: book is published and on the shelves
15 months: design and layout finalized and going to print
12 months: editing and rewriting complete
9 months: feedback received and second drafter finished
6 months: first draft finished, found publisher
3 months: first draft half finished
Today: hope and an idea
I've never written a novel, but this plan seems pretty optimistic. For a 90,000-word book, it requires writing 500 words a day, every day including weekends, for 6 months. That would be fine if you don't have a job, but a feat of extraordinary diligence if it's a side-gig. But you don't really know how long your book's going to be because there's no character/plot generation or outlining time built in here.
The advantage of backcasting is that it forces you to think clearly about these kinds of challenges so you can address those realistically now rather than hoping or guessing things will be all rosy.
It also allows you to think more flexibly about how to achieve your goals. By standing 18 months in the future with a published book in your hand, but appreciating the challenges in getting there, you can ask yourself what elements of this goal are most important to you and how might you better accomplish them.
It switches the question around from "how do we get there" to "how did we get here?"
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