First Principles Design Planning
‘It is all part of the plan’, says the Joker in one of the most nerve wrecking The Dark Knight scenes. The dialogue continues on the idea that if there is a plan and something happens outside of it… ‘everyone losses their minds’.
Nowadays, projects and programs are affected by constant internal and external events. Perfectly defining a plan, or direction, that is able to fully consider this randomness is close to impossible. Plans need to be nimble without losing sight of their utility.
To address the problem, we have to think in terms of first principles design, and not design plans by analogy. The difference between the two is as follows:
Design By Analogy: Involves drawing inspiration or ideas from existing solutions or systems and applying them to a new problem or design challenge. For plans, it means finding patterns among old plans and applying them to the creation of the new one.
First Principle Design: It is an approach that breaks down a problem into its fundamental components or principles and builds a solution from scratch based on those principles. For plans, it means to avoid using old plans as reference and instead focus on the key elements that make it useful.
Maintaining a plan that is designed by analogy can become a real mess if you have to adapt it to constant changes or events. The documents and templates used for the plan structure were thought for easily identifiable patterns. Changes, unless we are talking about ‘known unknowns’, can’t be framed inside a pattern. Ergo, you’d be spawning documents out of existing templates just to explain the update made on the plan.
In summary, the more updates you do to the plan, the more supporting documents you’ll have to create to follow the analog plan structure.
On the other hand, if we consider first principles design and focus on utility over identified patterns, we can just create a versioned plan where each update has a brief explanation on what has changed and why.
This approach simplifies stakeholder communication and transparency. All changes are easily traceable as they are all in the same document. Providing everyone a quick and easy to read snapshot of what we are trying to accomplish in the plan.
References:
- Concept Design By Analogy and First Principle Designs from the Book Banking 4.0
- Agile/Lean Documentation from agilemodeling.com
- ‘Known Unknowns’ from pmi.org
