Continuous Learning

I have always wondered why there is such a focus on having a plan. Ready, Aim, Fire is the modus operandi for many. The project management 101, people call it. The first thing is to come up with a plan, then we can execute toward the plan, and the rest would be history.

“Measure twice, cut once.”

“Fail to plan is plan to fail.”

Now - I do not doubt the wisdom behind these sayings. After all, if we do not know where we want to go, or if we do not know how to get there, we are unlike to make it. What I question is the applicability of these statements, especially under what situation are they applicable.

Because I intrinsically believe the practical usage is limited, in the sense that we need additional rules & guidelines to utilize the wisdom.

What I said above might appeal intuitively to you - at least it certainly does to me. After all, there are no universal truths in this world right? The challenge for me though, is that people behave as if there is such truth, at least in the case of having a plan. The first question people ask me about my startup is, “what is your plan?” The first thing executives ask a manager of a new project is “what is your plan?” When we elect a president, we want to hear about the candidate’s plan. We as a culture always want to go somewhere, and we are in love with a leader who has a plan to take us there.

As if once we have a plan, we are guaranteed to get there.

Of course, without a plan, we probably will not get anywhere. However, having a plan alone is not sufficient guarantee, either, certainly not in reality. But all we seem to care about is the plan. As if in our subconscious, once we have a plan, the rest will take care of itself.

This boils down to the philosophy of Ready, Aim, Fire. The challenge and the effort is in the aim. Now - under what situation would such philosophy work the best? Under what situation is it deficient?

Ready,… What’s Next?

(Note - I am not experienced in gun or warfare. Some of the terminologies I use probably are incorrect, but I trust you get my drift)

If we are hitting stationary targets, the approach of Ready, Aim, Fire works very well indeed, because after all, if something is not moving, your chance of hitting it becomes higher by default. Most people start learning how to shoot on stationary targets before moving to more difficult ones. As the trivial case, the Ready, Aim, Fire approach works quite well.

Now - what if the target is moving, with or without rhythm?

In such case, it is often more difficult to aim. Instead, besides aiming you need to learn to anticipate the motion of the target. In another words, instead of attempting to hit where the target is currently, you would need to determine where the target would be when your bullet arrives to the target’s plain. Such technique, is of course, much more advanced and requires extensive training, and often depends solely on experiences and feel, rather than analytical calculation. You would seldom hear experts explaining their aiming technique as “If the target move by 3 inches with the rate of .072cm/sec toward north, with additional acceleration, with applying the bullet velocity and the wind speed that tops out at 15 knots, I know the bullet will arrive in the target precisely 1.273 seconds later.” Yes - as much to our dismay, at this level it is almost about feelings.

Instead of Ready, Aim, Fire, we have Ready, Anticipate, Fire.

Now, hitting a moving target is a difficult endeavor. Very few people can hit a moving target with only one shot. In order to ensure hitting the target, shooters best bring with them more than one bullet, as it is the only smart thing to do. Once we miss, we will have to re-aim, or re-anticipate, in order to take another shot, because unless we have hit the target the first time, it is bound to move to a different position.

Now we have Ready, Anticipate, Fire, and Anticipate, Fire, Anticipate, Fire, ad infinitum. And all the planning fanatics probably are uncomfortable about the fact that planning in such situation is less pertinent than the experiences and the capabilities for the execution.

At this point it should be clear that the original Ready, Aim, Fire needs to be “qualified” to be applied more broadly. However, we are not done examining situations yet - there are at least a few more.

What if we do not know where the target is? Or we only know where the target is in general sense, but it is being protected with crossfire? Or, what if, we are not the expert marksmen?

My brother, who is in the army, told me that over 90% of all bullets are used for suppressions. In other words, many bullets are fired to keep people from getting a good aim at you, and enemy is doing the same thing. In such case, you have to make sure you are well covered, and you have to get yourself into better positions to fire before your enemy get there. Instead of aiming, you are using bullets to create cover and move from location to location to get into better positions. The crossfires do hit enemy sometimes, but that would be a bonus, rather than expectation.

And if we truly do not know where the target is, then we have to go hunt for it. Covert operation is best in this circumstance, but often not possible, and we will get ourselves into crossfire situation.

In these cases, what do we call what we are doing? I do not know, but I think Ready, Fire, Aim describes it well.

If you are an expert marksman with extensive war experience, you might be laughing and rolling on the floor with my poor description of what happens in the line of fire But I hope the point is clear:

Ready, Aim, Fire only has limited applicability, toward limited circumstances. In the “real-world”, it is often the case that we do not know the exact location of the target, and the target is moving, and we are no expert marksman. The combination of all above calls for the Ready, Fire, Aim approach.

But we still go about and behave as if the world is made up of stationary targets, with precise locations, and we are the best marksman in the world. Is it just me, or is there something amiss here?

Now - I believe in the power of positive thinking and know the association between confidence and chance of success, and I am all for the virtue of planning. However, I am against the intended or unintended attempt to simplify and trivialize the problem and the execution effort, because I believe it deters us from the actual goal, and actually reduce our chance of success. And here is why.

The Cycle of Ready, Aim, Fire

The unspoken assumptions behind Ready, Aim, Fire philosophy are

1. We know what to do,
2. we can hit the target with one good aim,
3. and that we only have one chance to fire.

If we have missed, the consequence is almost dire. The best military analogy is probably sniping. The snipers takes as much time, sometimes days, to get one good aim at the target. Once they fire, they expose their positions to the enemies and are extremely vulnerable. While the consequence is not life and death in the corporate world, often companies need to (whether perceived or real) hit a time window with limited resources, and definitely the perceived consequence of failure here is almost as strong.

However, the perceived consequences are asymmetrical. In other words, there are plenty of incentives not to fail, but not as much to succeed. Sure, there might be promotions, recognitions, and other sorts of goodies if we succeed, but a failure often causes a career stall, if not demotion or outright dismissal, which is a much stronger motivator.

Hence, people often are more highly incented not to fail than to succeed in such circumstances.And the negative motivation is further heightened by the belief that we only get one shot, i.e. we better aim well, or we would have wasted the shot and become exposed. This meets Ready, Aim, Fire assumption #3.

Due to the high stake, we know intuitively we need to assign the best to the task. Unfortunately, this often degenerates to mean the best available to us at the time in practice, even if the best available at this time is not truly qualified. Below is a dramatic reenactment of the assignment scene:

“This effort is extremely visible and high profile, and our company’s future is dependent on it. You are really the best person we have at this time.” Your boss said.

“I am extremely honored, SIR!” You said.

“Can you do it?” Your boss said.

Now - this is a trick question, because there are multiple meanings

1. It can mean, “will you do it?” without implying either success or failure, or
2. it can mean, “are you capable of succeeding with your current capabilities?”, or
3. it can mean, “will you commit to getting it done, whether you are capable or not”

In any case, there is pretty much only one right answer, and that is an absolutely positively affirmative yes.

“YES! SIR! YE’SSIR!!” You said.

Whatever you really mean to say (”Yes, I will do it, but no guarantee”, “Yes, I am capable”, or “Yes, I will get it done.”), you have just committed your hide.

The interesting thing is, even if you know you are not up for the task, you are not likely to admit it, and this is due to the question’s ambiguity. While you might lack in some areas of capability, the reality is that there are always something to learn on the job anyways. And that is exactly where the thought would be: “I can learn on the job.”

What this translates into is that even if we do not know for sure we can accomplish the objective, we believe we can, and it translates into that we will learn what needs to be done, and shortened to we know what needs to be done. This meets Ready, Aim, Fire assumption #1.

And that leaves us with the crafting of the detail plan, i.e. the aim. Bolstered by the prevalent thinking that we are better than the average (of course if we all think this way, than half of us are probably overly confident), we believe we can aim true, and hence Ready, Aim, Fire assumption #2.

Now - is this the cause or the effect? I do not know, but the thinking is prevalent. A big objective translates into a big initiative, driven by culture of “timing is everything”, calls for “we will throw everything we have against it”, and that finally generates a plan for action. Whether we actually ended up meeting the plan, we are likely to miss the target.

Because the target likely has moved. We might not even know where the target is in the first place.

Hitting Moving Targets

The reason for creating the plan, as we know, is to ensure that we can hit the target. And in our Ready, Aim, Fire model, we spend a ton of effort to ensure the plan has enough thinkings built-in. The trouble with plans is that they are static. We can have the best plan in the world, but as the old military adage says “No plan survive the first contact with the enemy,” a static plan is basically worthless.

However, it is difficult to keep such plan updated. Even a static plan for a sufficiently large effort can take weeks if not months to create! Just imagine the effort to even track such plan in real time, let along changing and generating a new plan. Usually what happens then is that the plan would be kept static and abandoned, and people reverting back to “shooting from the hip” technique. The only purpose for the plan is that if the executives ever ask for it, we can say “we have a plan”, even though the actual execution hardly follow the plan.

I have to ask a question - does such plan serve its purpose?

The point here is to highlight the contradiction of reality versus ideal, not to bash the virtue of planning. The Ready, Aim, Fire model calls for “figuring everything out first” before execution, but that seldom matches the reality except in trivial cases. And the more we believe in such model, the more we invest in planning, and more effort will basically be thrown away in the actual execution, and the more likely we will continue to shoot from hip. In another words, the emphasis on upfront planning will increase our likelihood of wasting efforts, and lead to more ad hoc executions. This certainly is an unintended consequence, but definitely very real.

In places where the targets are more stationary, such approach is definitely beneficial to tackle scale. The detailed plan only has to be figured out by few brains, and the execution can be carried out by many hands. But in today’s world such applicability is definitely diminishing. In order to hit the moving target, we need to have more nimble approaches.

Our plan needs to be real-time. We need to be able to react to external changes spontaneously, without having to check with the central nervous system. Having a big centralized plan is a detriment. A good analogy is that a plan needs to be like a compass, i.e., as we are drifting off course, it would automatically readjust to help us come back on course. A big plan will drain the ability for team to respond to changes at such speed.

And we need to create a feedback loop for the plan. While the peripheral might be empowered to respond without checking with the headquarter. The headquarter still need to eventually adjust to pursue the new course if needed. Frequent feedback is better than occasional feedback.

All this means that we need to decrease the duration from planning to execution and feedback and re-plan. Without building agility across all organization, we will not be able to reap the true benefit of such approach.

And my belief is that until organizations realize they are operating under a limited concept, they will not be able to truly transform their organization to respond and plan real-time. Without a different mindset, people will continue to focus on having a plan, and execute without one. Without a different mindset, people will be focused on not to fail, rather than realizing that failure is the seed to success.

Fail frequently and the success will be yours.

When people operate from the perspective of Ready, Fire, Aim, they will realize that failure is integral part of the process. They will try different things, see how they work out, figure out how to improve, and repeat the process to get closer toward the target. They realize they have many shots, and that they do not yet know where the targets are, and hence they will take many shots, and will throw everything they have only when they are absolutely sure.

And this is when Ready, Fire, Aim works better than Ready, Aim, Fire.