Act now, plan later, document never

In the digital world, businesses can no longer wait to perfect product or services

Success, especially in businesses, has traditionally been attributed to well-planned action. A well-thought-out plan and its implementation is then documented in full detail, with the intent of replicating the same model for the same results. Digital, on the other hand, is a concept synonymous with innovation and change. In the digital world, technology advances with every passing moment. Naturally, dynamism of such an extreme nature can never be complemented by the conventional.
 
In recent years, it’s not just the pace of technological innovation that has gone from linear to parabolic but decision-making in every field has been forced to adopt the same approach. In such a scenario, businesses too need a complete reversal of the rules of the game.

 
Businesses need to keep up with every development and hence can’t afford to waste time planning for action and documentation. Instant action is the need of the hour, especially for tech-driven products and services. Take for example, demonetisation. On 8 November, 2016, PM Modi declared 86 per cent of the Indian cash was no longer legal tender. The nation faced an unprecedented cash crunch. A digital wallet company, later followed by its peers, took the bull by the horn and launched an ad campaign the very next day. Had they waited for planning a course of action first, they would have lost precious time and more importantly a huge volume of business.

 

To attain success, now businesses need to rely more on innovation, and innovation of any kind involves a certain amount of risk. No scale of planning can actually eliminate that risk. Then why should one put too much effort into planning?
 
Business projects today resemble an expedition more than traditional engineering. All you can do is be prepared for the unpredictable, keep your resources ready and improvise your moves to best combat the situation. In the digital era, something new happens with every passing minute.
 
Target customers and marketplace evolve constantly and so your products/services should immediately reflect feedback from those changes. Thus, businesses can no longer wait to perfect a product/service; instead they need to take instant decisions with real time planning. By doing so, planning time is actually better utilised by acting and hence learning more about how to succeed.

 
What has surfaced as a better approach is taking risks at a smaller scale. Since you can’t eliminate the risk of failing, it’s considered better to fail fast and early, minimising the business risk of failing big and publicly. Innovation-driven corporations like Google, P&G see failure as an essential part of their evolution and as businesses, they have an expectation of 50-80 per cent failure rate on product development and encourage more ideation.

While “act now, plan later” has emerged as the best way to tackle the dynamic digital age, it has also made documentation redundant. The ever-changing nature of the digital world hardly ever repeats itself. In such a case, documenting the process doesn’t make sense. Furthermore, large systems have persisted without any documentation. The constitution of the UK was never written. Even Rig Veda, the oldest and most important of the Vedas, remained unwritten for over 10 generations. Yet none of them have been lost. Similarly, at a time when re-traceable digital footprints accompany every action the need for documentation becomes irrelevant.

 
The digital world is a world of here and now. It’s the era of Lean Start-ups. Success is achieved by grabbing every opportunity at the earliest and the need for perfection has been replaced by a business’ ability to evolve.