YOU wrote the plan. Now YOU'RE the problem.

Your AI plan will be out of date well before you’re even close to delivering half of it.

Most people do get that.

But you’re the one who told everyone the plan and now you’re kind of stuck with it.

You named the tech. You laid out the approach. Everyone nodded because it all made sense.

Then six months later there’s a better way, and you’re the one who has to raise it.

Twenty years ago this barely came up. A technology change started with a bill of materials. You ordered the hardware, racked and stacked it, and lived with it for three years, because that’s what it cost and that’s how long it lasted. The commitment and the technology moved at the same speed.

Cloud changed the money but not really the model. Capex became opex, and we shifted to more agile ways of working, but you still picked a platform, signed a three-year agreement and put your people through training that only paid off if you stayed put for years.

Now AI has come along, and staying put for years seems unthinkable. Things are changing monthly. Sometimes weekly. The obvious choice in August isn’t the obvious choice by December.

The technology sped up. The way we commit to it didn’t. Three years is still the unit we plan in and report against, and that gap has to land somewhere.

Mostly it falls on whoever took the reins and made the plan.

Once that’s out there, on paper and captured in a leadership meeting, changing it costs you something personally. It feels like a backflip. So most people feel like they don’t want to open that can of worms. They stick to the plan, on the vendors they backed and the solution they named, and deliver something they suspect is no longer the best option.

I’ve watched good people do this. Why? Because it’s hard enough to do the job… having to fight the system is something no one has time for. The system rewards progress, sometimes at all costs. It doesn’t reward people who make waves.

So, you end up between a rock and a hard place.

What do you do?

The first and most important thing is what NOT to do. Don’t backflip on the vision. The purpose. The goal. You must be crystal clear on this from the start, and it’s work that is often rushed or skipped altogether.

With this clearly defined, you now have something to anchor to, and something to be immovable about. That earns respect, and that affords you the right to be flexible on how that goal is achieved.

You can deliver a plan and still fail. But if you deliver on a vision, you can’t really lose.

Practically, there are three steps to achieve this.

1. Split the plan in two.

Write the vision and the approach as two clearly separate sections, and make them look different on the page. One of them is the commitment you’re making. The other is your best thinking on how to get there right now, which is a very different kind of statement. Most plans don’t draw that line, so every sentence in the document ends up carrying the same weight, and if the two read the same then people will quite reasonably hold you to both.

2. Put a review date on the approach before anyone asks for one.

Say it out loud when you present it. Something like, this is the approach we’re taking now and we’ll come back to it in March. It’s one sentence, and it changes what a change means six months later. If you booked the review, revisiting the approach is just the process doing its job. If you didn’t, it looks like the leader got it wrong. Same decision either way, and day one is the only time you get to set that up.

3. Report against the vision, not the schedule.

Have a look at what your monthly report actually measures. If the headline is percentage complete against a schedule, what you’re really reporting is how closely you’ve stuck to a decision somebody made a year ago. Put a measure of the vision next to it, even a rough one that barely moves, because that’s the only number that tells you whether any of this was worth doing. It also buys you room to change the approach, because everyone can see what you’re actually chasing.

None of this stops the technology outrunning your governance cycle. That gap isn’t closing, and you’re not going to fix it from where you sit. What you can do is stop committing to the parts that were always going to age, and get a lot harder to move on the part that shouldn’t.

🎧 Prefer to listen?

This edition is also a conversation. Veda and I take the whole argument apart on Never Outdated™: “YOU wrote the plan. Now YOU’RE the problem.”

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