If you can plan a year out, you can also steer month to month. When you feel sure about twelve months, you can adapt week by week. By late June, you know more about July than you did in February. Decide closer to the moment. What’s so magical about mapping the whole year? Because conditions change and information improves, a decision taken near the action is likelier to be right than one made a year in advance. Certainty is not about horizon—it’s about relevance.
Plan this month, finish it, then plan the next. Craving certainty? Short horizons deliver more of it; long projections miss. Make more short-term calls and you’ll probably make better ones, because the information is fresh.
Now, someone might say, “What about go-to-market timing, or giving the marketing team three months’ notice? My CEO needs to know exactly what we’re building next year so we can hire.” I hear that. But I don’t need a tale about next year—that would be fiction. Let’s figure it out as we go; we’ll likely end up in a better place.
Some businesses do need long lead times: building a factory, designing an airplane, buying a Super Bowl spot, reserving a trade-show booth. Those dates lock you in. I’m not denying that. But treating every decision as if foretelling the future equals certainty doesn’t add up. A prediction isn’t certainty; it’s a guess.
You might argue, “If we define the destination a year out, we’ll get there.” Maybe. But we’ll land more accurately if we adjust en route. Sometimes we’ll make the same calls; other times we’ll choose better ones. In most cases, planning a year ahead buys little. Maybe you don’t need to know—you just want the sensation of knowing. Why is “figuring it out as we go” so frightening? That’s how life works for most of us anyway.
Old ideas don’t get seniority. They’re records of what we thought then, not what we should do now, especially as contexts change. I’d rather work from “here’s what we think now.” Every few weeks, we decide from scratch what’s worth doing next. Old ideas are fair game—if they’re as good as today’s. Prior notes don’t get priority.
Sell what exists today—not what it might become. Don’t placate or promise. Roll with it and learn from real, not imagined, usage. Don’t put yourself on the hook for what we once thought. Focus on what we think will matter as we go. If old ideas end up being good ideas, we’ll do them anyway.
We’ll decide along the way. We’ll decide differently near execution. So why forecast now?