One of my favorite quotes revolves around planning. It came from Helmuth Von Moltke, a 19th century German Field Marshall: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”1. The implication here is simple enough: the plan that makes total sense on paper quickly falls apart when confronting the entropy of reality. And yet planning is essential for getting a team moving in the right direction. As Dwight Eisenhower said, “I have found that plans are useless but planning is everything.” And thus we arrive at what I like to call the paradox of planning: planning is the act of creating something that is simultaneously infinitely valuable and completely worthless.
![A picture of Dwight Eisenhower, a man who understood the paradox of planning all too well](https://i0.wp.com/www.breakingthewheel.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Paradox-of-Planning.jpg?resize=880%2C475&ssl=1)