The quarterly plan is a comfort object

Most quarterly plans are not forecasts. They are rituals that make an unpredictable business feel briefly legible. That is a real function and I am not against it. The problem starts when a company forgets which one it is doing.

You can tell the difference by watching what happens in week seven. A forecast gets revised when the inputs move. A ritual gets defended — because the point was never accuracy, it was the feeling of having decided.

Two costs nobody prices in

The first is the fortnight. Somewhere between two and three weeks of senior time goes into building each plan, and roughly the same again into reporting against it. In a twelve-week quarter that is a third of the leadership team’s attention spent describing the work rather than doing it.

The second is subtler. A published plan makes it socially expensive to notice that the plan is wrong. The person who raises it in week seven is not delivering information, they are creating work. So they wait for the retro, where it is safe, and where it is also useless.

A plan you would not change on new information is not a plan. It is a promise you made to feel calmer.

What to do instead, roughly

Keep the cadence and shrink the artefact. Three outcomes, not thirty tasks. One named owner per outcome. An explicit line at the top saying which assumption would have to break for the plan to be wrong — and a standing agreement that anyone who spots it breaking says so that week, not at the retro.

None of this is new. It is just harder than making the deck, which is why most companies make the deck.