Failing to Plan is not Planning to Fail

The topic of planning has come up recently in some of the podcasts, that I listen to,
http://www.securitycatalyst.com/ and http://www.mckeay.net/ There are basic options when it comes to planning:
1 Fail to Plan, Wing it and hope things go well.
2 Plan to Fail, Plan knowing things will go wrong, while trying to come up with where and when they can fail.

When failing to plan you need to have people who can react to a situation rationally, have lots of experience. Then depending on the type and severity of the failure you can make it out of the problem relatively unscathed. I speculate that we do not even notice failures, they just manifest them selves as slowdowns to the project.

While planning to fail, in contrast means that you realize that failure can and probably will occur, but during you meeting(s) you try to mitigate the affects of failure. The act of planning causes you to think about the project and can help you to work in the group. Even if nothing in your plan or contingency is used, you have at least though about the project and have more open communication with the group.

-- Tim Krabec
Kracomp.com