No Plan Has Ever Survived First Contact
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There is an old military proverb heard in military units all over the world:
“No plan has ever survived first contact.”
Plans that took days or weeks to put together can go south real fast. A dog attacks you in a field you’re crossing. A vehicle breaks down at exactly the wrong time. It never fails: good old Mr. Murphy always knows where you are and shows up uninvited, right when you can least afford the visit.
I remember a training evolution back in the 1980s where, in the middle of the night, our patrol arrived at the objective rally point and one guy unknowingly took up position directly on top of a hornets’ nest.
The plan changed instantly
Noise discipline was gone
We shifted real fast from training to med evac
That’s the point most people miss.
Very few plans ever make it from start to finish without needing to be revised, or having contingencies activated. That’s why it’s called planning, not predicting. You don’t succeed because of the plan. You succeed in spite of the plan.
Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as saying that if he had an hour to cut down a tree, he would spend 45 minutes sharpening the axe. I’m sure he did just that, but he also had an extra sharpening stone and probably a spare axe handle in the shed, just in case.
I’ve seen many project managers and leaders take that idea and twist it into something reckless and foolish. Months spent crafting the “perfect” plan. Every known captured. Every cost estimated. Every dependency documented.
And almost no attention paid to risk, contingencies, or failure modes.
Then reality shows up.
🛳️ The ship carrying an overseas order of equipment sinks.
📐 A technologist makes a unit conversion error and the 500 metre custom designed fibre optic cable you needed shows up measuring exactly 500 feet.
🏗️ A 30 story building is announced to be built right in the transmission path of your planned microwave tower network
And suddenly the perfect plan collapses under the weight of very predictable uncertainty.
You don’t need a perfect plan.
You need a reasonable plan built on the pessimistic assumption that if it can go wrong, it will.
👉 Identify what is going to go wrong.
👉 Prepare for Mr. Murphy’s knock on the door.
👉 And be ready to adjust without panic when someone lies down on a hornets’ nest.
🐺 That’s how we get things done.
