Peter Sorgenfrei argues that good plans stay adaptable by making decisions you can undo. He weighs the costs of reversing choices, financial and cultural, using examples like moving to Spain and hiring an employee to show how to assess reversibility and let plans evolve.
How do we navigate uncertainty? Or in other words, what's a good plan? A good plan is a plan that can be changed. That's really it, right? So make a plan, go execute against the plan, but if you made a good plan, it's something that you can change along the way without completely derailing you. So in one Another way of saying it is to say, well, you have to make decisions that you can undo. So whenever you make a decision, is this a decision that we can undo? So going into Spain, if you're not in Spain, can we undo that decision? Yes, we can. But what is it going to cost us? Or hiring this person, can we undo that decision later on? Yes, we can, but it's going to have some cost, both economically and to our team and to the culture. So a way of making a good plan that can be changed is to look at, can we undo the decisions that we're going to make, and what are the associated costs with undoing them? That's a good plan.
