An old client of Ideasphere Partners, and now a dear friend, asked me a couple of months back to spend a day with an executive team reviewing a project. It was one that had gone horribly wrong in a small company he owns in his semi-retirement from executive life. He was frustrated! It was an important project with his full support, well planned , with good objectives, and managed by one of his young “Ivy league educated” stars. A project “guaranteed” to succeed, that not only failed; it did so in a spectacular way. It was something no one saw coming until it was too late. After we worked through the project history, a pattern emerged that made it, in hindsight, obvious it was doomed to fail from the beginning.
“What went wrong in our project planning?” was the question my friend asked and the one got me started with this blog about a month ago (never enough time to write for fun these days). As we worked through their project, and I thought more about projects I have seen fail over the years, including some of my own, the more interesting question became “why do perfect plans many times produce perfect failures?”. So here it goes:
