It’s August. It’s also budget and roadmap season. I’ve already been planning for next year for a couple of months. You can’t make this up.

Like most leaders in large organizations, I’ve spent plenty of time in planning conversations. We build roadmaps, forecast budgets, negotiate headcount, debate priorities, and try to make reasonable decisions about what we’re going to need six, twelve, sometimes eighteen months from now.

There is nothing inherently wrong with doing that. Companies need a strategy. Finance needs some idea of where the money is going. Teams need enough direction to make decisions without renegotiating priorities every week.

The problem is what happens after the plan is approved.

Because between now and next August, a lot is going to change.

Customer expectations will shift. New technology will become viable. Some projects will turn out to be harder than expected. Others will turn out to be unnecessary. New opportunities will emerge that we haven’t even considered yet.

And somehow, despite all of that new information, we’ll still be talking about whether we delivered what we said we would deliver back when we were sitting here in August.

I’ve started to wonder whether annual planning and budgeting, at least the way most large organizations practice them, need to die.

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