Make A Bad Plan

One of my more lucrative techniques at work I call Make A Bad Plan. This is where you know that something has to happen, but no one really has a good idea of exactly what or exactly how to do it, and also it's a lot easier to go work on less ambiguous projects, so how do you make it happen anyway, when no one, including you, really knows what "it" is?

Two common ways this comes up are when you can see that there's an important problem in a system even if you don't know how to solve it, and when you can see that there's an important piece of information that humans know that isn't baked into automated systems and if only it was then something would be better, who knows what, but clearly humans know and act on this kind of thing so we should be able to use it, right?

Make A Bad Plan calls for you to make a bad plan. Think of a few "something"s, pick one or synthesize one from your (bad) options, write it up as a draft proposal with enough detail that a reader can really see what executing the plan will look like, and ship it around for comments. Or have a meeting where everyone's going to read the plan and then discuss it. Secretly, your aim is not to get it accepted wholesale, though don't bluff - make something that at least wouldn't be terrible to tweak and then implement. Your aim is for everyone to tear apart the very concrete plan you made, leaving whatever they reveal as the core intact, probably replacing pieces with better pieces.

This seems to work much better than trying to get people to get together and come up with a plan. My theory is that it's a lot easier to let someone else move your brain into the vaguely correct idea-space and then gradient descent from there, than it is to bravely move your own brain into the scary space that you know will take a lot of effort to navigate skillfully enough to Make A Good Plan that other people won't immediately tear apart. There's some kind of social barrier to entry, and by Making A Bad Plan yourself, you also jumpstart everyone through that initial activation energy barrier.

Just like being the one to suggest a restaurant or giving shy friends a reason to get together even if the real gain is just hanging out, you're providing a public service, doing the scary thing. And in a decent culture this strategy is very rewarding. People recognize that the only reason something happened is because you made it happen, and they don't disdain you for your Bad Plans, as long as you keep being right about there being value somewhere past the social barriers. The value materializes, people know you were the pusher. It's a different reward than "ah ha, the expert who only brings expert insights to the table", so you've got to get used to that if you were always "the smart one" or whatever, so... do that. Practice it until your brain does recognize the new type of reward. It's a lot cheaper to get than the expert thing.