When laid out like that, it’s obviously a bad idea. But remember that it emerges from a desire to get going on a project, to see work happening, to have tangible evidence of progress. That’s good. Everyone involved in a project should have that desire. It becomes trouble only when we belittle planning as the annoying stuff we have to deal with befo

Anyone contemplating a risky experiment may feel compelled to mitigate the risk by spending too much time meticulously planning the experiment. But often, the outcomes, however well planned, are unpredictable because the experiment engages a complex world in a new way. So action is the only way forward. One just has to run the experiment to find ou

The solution: Break the big thing into smaller things. The smaller it is, the easier it is to estimate. You’re probably still going to get it wrong, but you’ll be a lot less wrong than if you estimated a big project. If something takes twice as long as you expected, better to have it be a small project that’s a couple weeks over rather than a long

A preference for doing over talking—sometimes distilled into the phrase “bias for action”—is an idea as common in business as it is necessary.