PTW/PI All-Stars Book Club – Chapter Two
Why Planning Over Strategy?
Welcome to Chapter Two of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) book club. Again, in the spirit of a book club discussion, I will do my best to respond to all comments, which I have done for all comments on Chapter One. Of the 37 all-star pieces out of the 260 in the series, the randomizer picked as second chapter Why Planning Over Strategy? As with the first, this one is from the second biggest category – help on understanding the context for strategy. You can find the whole PTW/PI series here.
My Reflections
The piece was spurred by my viral video, A Plan is not a Strategy. At the time I wrote this piece, the video had only been out for only two months and already had over one million views. Little did I realize that it would rack up over another five million views – it is at 6.3 million and counting.
To me, the crazy success of the video begged the question of why planning does dominate over strategy. And wow, does it ever. Planning is winning more over strategy now than it was three and a half years ago when I wrote the piece. So, I am glad this made the cut for this all-star book club.
There are two themes in the piece on which I will focus my reflections.
Self-Reinforcing System
The first is that there is a self-reinforcing system in action that continues to entrench planning ahead of strategy – as illustrated in the graphic heading up this piece. It isn’t an accident. As Stafford Beer, the father of management cybernetics, cleverly pointed out that: “The purpose of a system is what it does. There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” I dedicated a PTW/PI to Beer’s view and how it relates to the practice of strategy.
In this case, analysis is taught in business schools as the only meritorious basis for all decisions, which populates the worlds of both business management and strategy consulting with acolytes who believe that to be unquestionably true. When a businessperson has a strategy question/problem and hires a business consultant to solve it, that consultant will undertake a prescribed set of analyses and will advise the businessperson to engage in a set of initiatives based on what the analyses dictate. Anything else is deemed to be heretical. There is perfect alignment on this across business management, business education, and strategy consulting. Strategy is defined as a plan that is based on the outputs of various analyses taught at business schools. So, planning rules – that is, per Beer, the purpose of the current entirely self-sealing system.
Technocrats vs. Strategists
The second theme is the battle between technocrats and strategists. This was a framing that I was just starting to formulate three and a half years ago when I wrote the piece. I returned to the theme twice in Year V, first with a piece directly on the subject, Technocrats vs. Strategists and second as a key element of the capstone final piece in the whole series, Fixing Strategy.
Technocrats do truly rule the modern world, dominating both public policy and business. Schools of both public policy (like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government) and business (like Harvard Business School) train technocrats to be technocratic by equipping them with technocratic tools.
Their core teaching tool is the misapplication of science – that is, they teach unsuspecting students to misapply science with the purpose of turning them into card-carrying technocrats. These schools defy the warning of the father of science, Aristotle. As I have argued repeatedly in this series (here and here) and elsewhere (here), Aristotle both invented science and warned against its use outside the domain for which he created it. Aristotle created it for the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are – primarily the physical world. Gravity can never be other than it is. If we analyze past data in this part of the world, it will be predictive of the future.
But Aristotle warned against using it in the part of the world where things can be other than they are – which includes (but is not limited to) the entire worlds of business and public policy. Had we analyzed smartphone use in 1999 – which was zero because the first BlackBerry smartphone was introduced in 2000 – we would have never been able to predict that a quarter-century later there would be seven billion in use.
Aristotle’s warning aside, these technocratic educators create and teach techniques for analyzing the past to decide what to do in the future. Students become technocrats when they hold as self-evident that being scientific in all things is meritorious and not being scientific is irresponsible, or worse yet, immoral.
But when their entirely technocratic decisions don’t go as planned – i.e. the future doesn’t cooperate with them – they blame the results on stuff that shouldn’t have happened.
COVID 19 was an orgy of technocracy. Science supposedly said it wasn’t a lab leak – but it turned out that it was. Science said the vaccine will prevent you from getting COVID – it didn’t. Science said that the vaccine will prevent transmission – it couldn’t. Science said the vaccine is safe – it wasn’t and soon it will be obvious that the COVID vaccines killed more people than COVID. We were told nonstop for years by the technocrats that we needed to ‘follow the science’ and anybody who didn’t was responsible for killing people – i.e. it was ‘the pandemic of the unvaccinated.’
Yet in the aftermath of the greatest public health botch-job since the widespread medical enthusiasm for bloodletting, all the technocrats can say is that they did the best they could have. There is no self-reflection, no rethink, no “next time there is a new thing that we call ‘novel,’ by which we mean that it has never happened before, maybe there isn’t any science to follow.
I have come to believe, and wrote a Year V piece on it (which summarized a speech I gave at Nudgestock 2025) that to escape this closed system, businesspeople who don’t want to submit to life as a technocrat need to go on the offensive. Rather than apologizing for refusing to misapply science, attack the misapplication of science by technocrats. Ask them why are they so sure that the future will be identical to the past? They will claim that they don’t think it will. But then explain to them that the analytical tools that they use make that very assumption. That is, when they ‘follow the science,’ that is the assumption that they are implicitly making.
Never stop attacking. Don’t get put on the defensive by accepting the criticism that you can’t prove your decision in advance. Remind them that in the part of the world that the future can be other than the past no decision can be or ever has been proven in advance analytically.
Reader Reactions
It was interesting to read the reactions to the piece. More than one reader described it as a ‘mind bender.’ I like that. Sometimes bending the minds of readers is necessary.
There was a recognition that in a drive for safety and predictability, planning is comfortable because people don’t want to think of themselves making choices. The lists of initiatives produced in a planning exercise don’t feel like choices for them and therefore are less scary.
It was striking how queasy readers were about giving up analysis – something they have all been trained to think of as sacrosanct. Of course, I don’t advocate ceasing to use analysis. My simple rule is that if you are contemplating ‘doing what the analysis says,’ then you must first ask the question: Do I believe the future is going to be identical to the past? If you are confident in making that assumption, follow the science. Use data from the past to make inferences about the future.
If you are confident that the assumption is false, don’t ‘do what the analysis says.’ It will lead you to a bad decision. Recognize that the analysis can be only one of many inputs you need to use to make the best decision you can. And it doesn’t take the place of first among equals. Single datapoints, qualitative information, analogies and deep experience are as or more important than any rigorous ‘scientific’ analysis you can perform.
Because of the thorough indoctrination in the educational system, that was a hard message for readers to take on. Enough readers viewed and read the piece to make it an all-star article. But there was a drop from reads to claps. That doesn’t delight me, but some of my pieces are going to have less face appeal than others – and that is OK as long as I provoke thinking.
With no further ado, the original article…
Chapter Two
I am boggled that my video on planning versus strategy has gone viral, poised to hit over 1 million views in just a little over two months since Harvard Business Review put it up on June 29. But from the comments and reviews, people are really intrigued — including a fascinating guy who used the whole video, slice by slice to do an analysis of Tesla’s strategy versus GM’s plan. His has gotten almost another 100K views! Lots of the questions I have gotten have been about why is there such a predominance of planning over strategy in the business world? So, I decided to write about Why Planning Over Strategy: And How to Fix the Problem.
Why Planning Over Strategy?
As with many things in life, an outcome that doesn’t make sense, ironically, is often the product of a process that makes lots of sense. There is an enormous amount of planning in the modern world of business and very little strategy — for a reason. I have laid out the causal map (with feedback loops) above and will talk through it below.
I fail to understand what value the COVID ranting is bringing to this piece.
You just state 'things are not what they seem' without providing any evidence (or pointing to such) enabling to test your claims.
I completely agree that analysis has come to dominate the foundation of most decision-making, largely because it offers a convenient escape from the messier, more uncertain work of true strategic choice. In practice, analysis feels safe. It allows people to present recommendations with an air of scientific certainty - backed by data points, trend lines, and hard facts - which makes it far easier to defend in a corporate setting than a decision rooted in intuition or judgment.
But too often, this reliance on analysis becomes a way to avoid making difficult choices. People hide behind “the data,” as if the numbers alone dictate the path forward, absolving them of the responsibility that comes with real leadership. And because analysis is not as objective as it pretends to be, it’s also highly susceptible to manipulation. Those with an agenda can frame the problem, select the inputs, and emphasize the metrics that support their preferred outcome - all while maintaining the appearance of rigor and neutrality.
When you present strategy as a series of stops - each requiring a difficult choice, a trade-off, or a bet on an uncertain future - it becomes much harder to argue that the path was inevitable. That’s why framing strategy as an analytically determined roadmap is so appealing: it removes the friction of human judgment and replaces it with the illusion of certainty. In reality, the most important decisions can’t be reduced to a spreadsheet.