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Planning: Complex Endeavors (Alberts, Hayes, 2007)

David S. Alberts, Richard E. Hayes

JLJ - Alberts is undisputed "king" of the arrow-overloaded "high level block diagram", complete with multiple bending arrows, boxes, and shaded-colorings which belong in a PowerPoint advertisement and imply vaguely-specified "things" flowing into other "things" - more to be admired as Louvre works of art than actually understood. 

You don't so much as read Alberts and Hayes as "swirl" with them at a high level, peering down like Zeus-from-Olympus on the ant-like creatures far beneath you that need to plan to survive.  Pity these poor creatures - we know all about them and their problems, so we will show them (and you) how to plan effectively in complex environments. The lights now dim in the room as the PowerPoint presentation begins - we are seated in a large auditorium, and wonder at the knowledge of Alberts and Hayes, and how we could have been so ignorant to have not seen this before. 

But when the lights brighten we rush back to our current efforts, mad to plan away with new-found knowledge, we forget what it was exactly that we learned, like a dream at the morning alarm. The boxes and arrows are nowhere to be seen.

Mark my words, these concepts will re-appear in the business world as snake-oil-style "make yourself successful with agile", or something like that. Pick up a copy, mull over the magical boxes and arrows, and maybe you will get rich quick. 

p.130-131 planners dealing with complex situations must seek agility: sets of actions that ensure that their approaches are flexible (provide more than one way to achieve success), robust (are effective across a variety of circumstances in order to allow for changes in the situation), resilient (permit recovery from missteps or adversity arising from a lack of full understanding), responsive (able to act within windows of opportunity), innovative (able to do new things or old things in new ways so that they have a greater chance of success than taking actions adversaries can anticipate), and adaptive (permitting changes in both processes and organization as information is gained about the complex situation). These aspects of agility are needed to overcome the incomplete understanding that characterizes complex systems and the uncertainty (or unpredictability) associated with them.

p.131-132 some guidelines for planning emerge:

• Planners should favor actions that improve their information positions, specific activities that will allow them (and decisionmakers) to learn about the complex situation and will result in observable effects of behaviors that provide feedback on their impacts.
• Planners should prefer actions that (a) do not commit high levels of resources and/or (b) are reversible. This allows them to react quickly and effectively as they (and the decisionmakers) learn what works, what does not matter, and what is counterproductive.
• Planners should husband resources over time so that they are able to change approaches as the complex situation or complex adaptive system changes.

p.136 Complex situations, particularly those that involve complex adaptive systems, are so intricate and involve so many links between and among elements that those planning for them are seldom confident that they understand all the factors involved or how they fit together (in complex situations, this is a correct perception).

p.149-150 the idea of requisite agility... is related to the concept of "requisite variety" from cybernetics. Rather than searching for an infinite amount of agility or viewing agility as an unmitigated good, the goal here is to ensure that the planning process and plans have adequate agility for the situation(s) at hand.

p.155 The value of planning comes from the process and not the plan. This is because, as Prussian General Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. As the situation changes and as plans fail to achieve their desired effects, plans need to be reassessed and modified or even completely replaced.

p.181 To generate the information necessary to answer the questions (and ask the right questions) and to sort out the more promising approaches from the less promising approaches, a campaign of experimentation, accompanied by focused research, needs to be undertaken.

p.182 A campaign of experimentation is not just a collection of experiments but involves a series of steps in moving from concepts to capabilities and serves as "a process that (1) combines and structures experimental results much in the way that individual bricks are fashioned into a structure for a purpose, and (2) steers future experimentation activities."

p.182 A campaign of experimentation is a journey from the general to the specific. In this case, it involves moving from concepts to capabilities and from hypotheses to understandings.