Navigating versus planning
Why organizations get stuck in their own methodology and what the alternative is.
Navigating versus planning
Why organizations get stuck in their own methodology and what the alternative is.
There is a persistent assumption in Dutch public administration, and in organizational science in general, that complex changes become manageable by planning them. Project plans, roadmaps, Gantt charts, business cases, everything is deployed to create the illusion that the future is predictable if you document enough. Henry Mintzberg called this in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning "the grand fallacy": the idea that analysis can replace synthesis, that taking a problem apart automatically leads to a working solution.
Practice teaches otherwise. After twenty years of interim management in the public sector, I have not seen a single complex transition project that went according to plan. Not because the plans were poor, but because complex systems do not behave as project plans assume. There are too many variables, too many actors, too many unforeseen interactions. What does work is what Karl Weick called "sensemaking": continuously reading the situation and responding with what is available.
Navigation is the alternative to planning. Not as an absence of direction but as a different relationship to uncertainty. In navigation, the direction is fixed but the route is free. You know where you want to go but you determine the next step based on what you see now, not on what you thought up three months ago.
That requires three things. First: situation reading, the ability to diagnose what is actually happening in an organization, beyond the official stories and reports. Second: room to maneuver, the willingness to deviate from the plan when the situation demands it, without this being considered failure. Third: directional consistency, maintaining the destination even when the route changes.
Most organizations are designed for the opposite. They reward plan adherence, punish deviation and measure success by the gap between plan and reality. In a stable environment, that is workable. In an environment that is fundamentally unpredictable, and that is the reality of virtually every government organization today, it is a recipe for paralysis.
The vocabulary for navigation is largely absent. We have words for planning, steering, controlling, monitoring. We barely have words for what experienced leaders actually do: reading, weighing, adjusting, pushing through, letting go. Developing that vocabulary is not academic. It is operationally necessary.
Sources: Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Free Press, 1994); Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Sage, 1995).
Source: Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Free Press, 1994); Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Sage, 1995)