Engaged Curiosity
A guide to realistic planning
in organizations and communities
Jack Ricchiuto
Books by Jack Ricchiuto
Collaborative Creativity / 1996
Accidental Conversations / 2002
Project Zen / 2003
Appreciative Leadership / 2005
Mountain Paths / 2007
Conscious Becoming / 2008
Instructions From The Cook / 2009
The Stories That Connect Us / 2010
Enchantment Of Casual Origins / 2011
The Joy Of Thriving / 2012
Ordinary Eyes / 2012
The Agile Canvas Field Guide / 2012
Abundant Possibilities / 2013
The Power Of Circles / 2013
Making Sense Of Time / 2014
Beyond Recipes / 2014
Focus / 2015
Smarter Together / 2015
Ideas / 2015
The Art Of Conversations / 2016
The Way Of Questions / 2017
The Growth Imperative / 2018
Simple Listening / 2019
Path / 2019
The Poetry of Human Emotion / 2020
The Language of Trusted Leaders / 2021
A Radical Kindness / 2021
Reimagining Communities / 2021
Textures / 2022
Perspectives / 2022
Together / 2022
Words In Flow / 2023
Ready & Able / 2023
Ready & Able Workbook / 2023
Flawless Planning 3rd Edition / 2024
Engaged Curiosity / 2025
Engaged Curiosity
A guide to realistic planning in organizations and communities
Jack Ricchiuto
Nuance Works
1020 Kenilworth Avenue
Cleveland OH 44113 USA
JackRicchiuto.com
Engaged Curiosity © 2025 Jack Ricchiuto
ISBN 9798284111215
Paperback
May 2025
Printed in the USA
Production: Kindle Direct Publishing
Cover design: Tia Andrako
Contents
The provocation of realistic planning
Practice basics
Group dynamics
Planning contexts
The provocation of realistic planning
Invitation
It might seem odd to talk about the possibility that planning could be realistic. Planning is realistic when groups in organizations and communities engage in a Pathway Conversations™ framework.
The framework features four simple conversations that engage the four gifts we bring to any planning we do together.
It originally emerged from work in the mid-1990s that became Collaborative Creativity: Unleashing the Power of Shared Thinking. It outlined a groundbreaking framework of engaged curiosity, generating new possibilities through new questions.
Realistic planning could be somewhere between an oxymoron and a provocation for people unfamiliar with the distinction. The oxymoron argument is strongly supported by the reality that around 80-90% of organizational strategic and community comprehensive planning fails simply because it is unrealistic. Unrealistic doesn’t work.
Through the misfortune of common logic errors and in the absence of alternatives, otherwise smart people keep doing the same unrealistic planning, hoping for better results. Interestingly, people never look back when they have a viable alternative in a realistic planning framework.
Over the past several decades, I’ve guided a variety of organizations and communities in planning. These have been across the globe, including large and small organizations and urban and rural communities. I’ve repeatedly discovered how those who do well do realistic planning and those who do not do unrealistic planning.
To create their best possible future, organizations and communities don’t need different financial structures, strategic priorities, strengths or weaknesses, opportunities or threats, better people or leaders, more stable markets, more mature politics, or better predictions about the future.
When shaping the future, doing well has one requirement: realistic planning conversations.
In this immediately applicable book, you will discover a framework for making every planning conversation realistic.
You might be surprised that realistic planning conversations have little to do with conventional planning practices pandered in the most prestigious B-schools and big consulting firms. The only reason why an organization or community would ever keep repeating conventional practices in hopes of different outcomes is that they lack an alternative, realistic framework.
That’s the point of this book: to give people in organizations and communities a viable and affordable framework that works every time because it’s based on reality. The future belongs to people whose plans are entirely aligned with reality.
What’s important is that you don’t try to believe or disbelieve what’s here. Nothing is here to affirm or deny your assumptions about planning. Everything offered here is for you to try out and see for yourself.
In your next two plans, try a realistic approach to one and an unrealistic approach to the other and just notice what happens.
Planning
Planning is productive to the extent that it is realistic. Realistic is based on the reality of questions and actions.
Planning can happen in any kind of organizational and community groups, including companies, non-profits, non-government agencies, programs, neighborhoods, regions, and formal and informal networks of people and organizations like associations.
Planning on any scale can take us somewhere or nowhere depending on how we approach it. It depends on how realistic or unrealistic our planning is. Realistic planning takes us somewhere; unrealistic planning takes us nowhere. When realistic, planning makes us more conscious and so, more ethical—prioritizing the common good for all.
There are many indicators that planning is unrealistic.
Bloated consultant plans collect dust on shelves until someone decides the same process should be repeated because it would embarrassing to have a future with no plan.
There are enough yawns, eye-rolls, and push backs in reaction to rolled-out plans that leaders feel the need to launch promotional campaigns and conversions of the unfaithful through expensive “change management” programs.
People argue they should stop planning and just “start doing” things based on their unquestioned assumptions because their planning framework is essentially unrealistic.
Leaders instill a culture of fear by holding people accountable for unrealistic plans. What matters to people is that they meet their demise in death by parking lots.
People are urged to obsess over deficiencies and threats while planning gives lip service to strengths and opportunities.
Unrealistic planning assignments are so unsavory they are referred to as assumption-annealed “rocks.”
Leaders are sent to leadership training to equip them for managing all the ways unrealistic plans will be unfulfillable and all the ways people will resist having “more work” without more reward.
In realistic planning, new results are immediate and ongoing. People eagerly engage in planning because it is based on reality, which is where people on the ground live. Planning is affordable because people do the doable with what they have—not with what they lack.
People embrace change because change happens by them rather than to them. Deep market pattern sensing and innovation become commonplace because people continuously question self-limiting assumptions.
When people lament that planning wastes time in meeting after meeting and report after report, they’re referring specifically to unrealistic planning. When people value planning as vital to shaping the future they want to see, they are referring to realistic planning.
Reality
In realistic planning, we work from the distinction between reality and assumption. It’s not necessarily a difficult distinction to grasp. This distinction forms the foundation for realistic and unrealistic planning.
In training programs focused on engaged curiosity, 10-year-olds are learning to master the distinction even when some adults confuse assumptions for reality. Children achieve this mastery in discovering the power of questions.
Since the dawn of humanity, people have done all kinds of insane things, from the definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The repetition of failure is simply unrealistic planning—working from assumptions rather than questions. Interestingly, whole groups can do insane things regardless of their collective education or economics.
In moments of sanity, groups can do different things to get different results if they operate from reality rather than assumptions.
Assumption is something we imagine as real or true. Reality is something real or true that we don’t imagine.
Before we go to the market, there are things there that we imagine. Each imagined thing is an assumption. Reality is everything there that we don’t imagine. No matter how confidently we declare an assumption as true or real, it’s still an imagined assumption, not reality.
There is an old scouting maxim: if the map and terrain disagree, follow the terrain. This is realistic planning.
When we work from assumptions, no matter how much certainty we feel about them, there is also some margin of uneasy uncertainty because our brain knows assumptions are not reality and constructs feelings of discomfort until we operate from reality. Working from reality, we feel grounded because our brain has an easier time constructing what we experience when we’re working from reality than assumptions.
We’re aligned with reality when we chop vegetables with our eyes open—working from engaged curiosity rather than assumptions.
Realistic planning is based on reality. In planning, reality has three dimensions: questions, actions, and learning. Unrealistic planning is based on assumptions.
Assumptions have three dimensions: hopes, concerns, and expectations. Planning based on questions, actions, and learning is not based on hopes, expectations, or concerns.
When I see groups aligned and working productively, it’s because they’re continuously aligned with reality. When I see groups divided and struggling, it’s because they’re working from assumptions.
Interestingly, groups doing unrealistic planning often do this unconsciously. They assume their unquestioned assumptions are reality and operate accordingly. They cannot be reality-aligned in their planning until they discover the distinction between reality and assumption.
It doesn’t help that the conventional approaches to planning in organizations and communities promote unrealistic planning, expecting groups to develop their plans based on the assumptions of goals, objectives, and priorities. It doesn’t matter if these are commanded top-down or arrived at by peer pressure.
Groups operating from the engaged curiosity of realistic planning know better—and do better.
Realistic planning, productive planning
The dizzying variety of life forms on this planet come about because of how four elements come together: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen. In realistic planning, we co-create an immense variety of collective efforts because of how four elements come together: learnings, assumptions, questions, and action.
People bring four gifts in any kind of planning: learnings, assumptions, questions, and actions. Planning is the contribution of their gifts to what they care about. Sharing their gifts makes planning realistic. It allows people to become more conscious, productive, and ethical together.
Planning fails when it is unrealistic. People inaccurately assume that they must predict the future to create it. Predictions are imagined assumptions about how the future could, should, or will be. Basing planning on imagined assumptions makes it unrealistic.
They wrongly assume that feeling confident in their unquestioned assumptions makes these assumptions realistic. It doesn’t matter that their confidence is a fragile faith in what they fail to question or what a majority assumes.
Three dimensions of reality include what we don’t know, what we can do, and what we bring about. What we don’t know are our questions. What we can do are our actions. What we bring about our our learnings.
Our questions are what we’re curious about. Actions are what we find out or try out to answer our questions. Learning is what we know from how our world responds to our actions.
Realistic planning involves iterations of translations. We translate assumptions into questions, questions into actions, and actions into learning. We answer our questions by finding something out or trying something out—research or experiments. We learn our way into the future we want to co-create.
Starting to plan with reports and then acting with assumption-based plans is unrealistic planning.
Working from assumption-based goals is unrealistic planning. Seeking to achieve goals based on assumptions about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is unrealistic planning. Investing in new strategies based on assumptions is unrealistic planning. Rolling out plans based on implementation assumptions is unrealistic planning.
We make planning realistic by questioning our assumptions, which means translating our assumptions into questions. The more questions we compose, the better our questions. Better questions mean better actions. Better actions mean better results.
Composing more questions means surfacing more assumptions. Assumptions turned into questions become prime assets in realistic planning. This is great news for groups whose strengths include making all manner of predictive assumptions about what could, should, or will happen in their uncertain future.
In realistic planning, we create the future without predicting it. It doesn’t get more radical than that.
Getting it wrong
It’s natural that people who don’t know what realistic planning is would assume their unrealistic planning is realistic planning. This could be planning they are mandating, funding, leading, or participating in.
Their incorrect assessment comes about because they would argue that their planning assumptions are realistic because they feel true and that lack of significant, credible resistance proves their assumptions are realistic.
The fundamental flaw in both arguments is that any assumptions could be realistic. That would be functionally impossible because all assumptions are imagined, and being realistic means operating entirely from reality and never assumptions.
The support leaders get for unrealistic planning from their direct reports, funders, investors, or consultants is based on everyone’s shared unfamiliarity with realistic planning. The highest risk unrealistic plans are those that are approved or funded.
The pivot to realistic planning takes about 90 minutes, where people discover the magic of turning their gifts of learning into assumptions, assumptions into questions, questions into actions, and actions into learning. Once people engage their gifts in realistic planning, they cannot return to the fiction of realistic assumptions. It doesn’t take much to get it right.
Gifts
In realistic planning, everyone brings four gifts. We engage them in what we care about. What we care about can be framed in the favorable terms of aspirations to be realized or the unfavorable terms of problems to be fixed.
Our planning framework is built from four Pathway Conversations™ that engage our four gifts. These are the gifts of learnings, assumptions, questions, and actions.
Each iteration through the conversations deepens group alignment and expands new results.
Learning: What do we know now for sure?
Everything we do, including waiting for things to happen, has consequences. Learning is what reality has taught us about the impacts of the actions we have taken relative to what we care about.
What we know for sure is based on reality rather than assumptions. If we’re not sure something is real or true, we put it with assumptions. If it is true or real for some people and not all, we put it with assumptions.
Assumptions: What assumptions do we have?
Assumptions are our best guesses about reality in the form of hopes, concerns, and expectations. These include imagined goals, priorities, and directions. All generalizations are assumptions. We don’t discuss or debate them because they are all useful fictions. We just turn them all into as many questions as we can.
Questions: What are our assumptions as questions?
Questions are unknowns—things that are unclear, unconfirmed, or undecided. They are our engaged curiosities. We form questions from assumptions, related to who, what, when, where, why, what if, and how. We put them in the order we will answer them and answer them through actions rather than discussion.
Actions: What will we do to answer our questions?
Actions are finding something out or trying something out. Finding something out is research; trying something out is an experiment. Everyone signs up for the actions they want to work on.
Everything that comes up in planning is a gift for one of the four conversations. Anything anyone thinks, feels, or does moves us from new uncertainties to new results.
The framework's simplicity could be quite odd to people used to making planning more complicated than it needs to be. We don’t need burdensome activities, multiple steps and rules, or long or short-term fictions, or labyrinthian structures. We just need four conversations engaging our gifts that makes planning realistic.
In the conversations, we turn assumptions into questions, questions into actions, actions into results, and results into learning. That’s all there is to it.
12 principles of realistic planning
Realistic planning works from a set of principles. These are not principles to believe or doubt; they are observations to test and see for ourselves.
1. Not having a plan is an unrealistic plan
The reluctance or refusal to plan because the future is too abundant with intolerable uncertainties is a plan based on all kinds of unquestioned assumptions, and a great starting point for realistic planning.
2. Unrealistic plans are high-risk, low-yield; realistic plans are low-risk, high-yield.
Unrealistic plans by design have high failure and cost rates; realistic plans are productive and efficient.
3. Realistic plans are pathways of question-based actions; unrealistic plans are timelines of assumption-based actions.
Realistic plans of question-based actions can go out as far into the future as we want; each new action results in a refresh of our question and action pathways.
4. Assumptions have no ability to reveal what could unpredictably happen to us or by us; questions have the ability to reveal these.
Assumptions constrain our ability to notice differences, including new possibilities and opportunities. Questions expand and deepen our ability to notice these, giving us more choices than we have with assumptions.
5. While old assumptions divide people, new questions unite them.
People weaponize old assumptions to take over a group; new questions bring people together on the same side of the table.
6. The assumptions of leaders, experts, and the majority voices have equal planning value to the assumptions of everyone else.
No matter how compelling or coercive assumptions might seem, they are all simply gifts of assumptions.
7. More assumptions lead to more questions; more questions lead to better questions; better questions lead to better actions; better actions lead to better results; better results lead to better learning.
Discussion has no ability to produce anything new because discussion is rehashing what we already know; only action on new questions has the ability to produce new results and learning.
8. The depth of our inspiration is equal to the duration of our assumptions.
Going out far in time inspires more depth of assumptions. Depth means variety of choices and alignment potential. The deeper our assumptions, the deeper our questions.
9. New questions have more ability to engage people’s strengths and assets than old assumptions.
Working from old assumptions requires engaging only what we have so far; further engagement of people’s strengths and assets becomes possible through new questions.
10. For differently minded people, new possibilities are many; for like-minded people, new possibilities are few.
People who need to think alike are more constrained in generating new questions, actions, and learning. People who value thinking differently are more free to generate new questions, actions, and learning.
11. People shift from complaining consumers to caring contributors when they vote with their feet.
People co-author their agency when they freely decide what actions to commit to. This is the shift from the innocence of victimhood to the responsibility of contributors. People with agency are unstoppable.
12. There are things we can do together that no one can do alone.
Nothing maintains the status quo more than everyone trying to do their best on their own. We are smarter and better together. Combined gifts yield exponential impacts.
The Framework Advantage
The framework has several distinctive features:
It can engage any number of people in any scope of work
It is question-based rather than assumption-based
It keeps people continuously aligned and productive
It moves groups from uncertainty to new results
It replaces discussion with action and hope with learning
The framework is an elegant solution to the problem of groups wrongly assuming they need complicated approaches to planning. These approaches require certification badges, martial arts belts, or advanced academic degrees.
The framework is useful in organizational and community projects and any kind of planning, including strategic, comprehensive, scenario, and project planning.
The framework is easily learnable because it only takes one iteration for groups to guide themselves through next iterations.
The framework is also particularly adaptable because it works with any planning constraints, including goals, metrics, key performance indicators, time and resource limitations, and the constant uncertainty.
It excels at leveraging available assets and engaging a variety of group personalities. Because of the social architecture of the process, no one in the group dominates or disappears, which increases the group’s collective intelligence, making them smarter together. It is also quite AI-friendly in our searches for finding new things out.
8 signs a group is doing unrealistic planning
People unconsciously do unrealistic planning until they discover the distinction between realistic and unrealistic planning. They don’t even know their planning is unrealistic. They just remain puzzled that yields never meet or exceed efforts.
Presentations
It’s fine for some people to present what they know for sure, as long as everyone else does also. Keeping the group quiet for presentations, the group moves forward with less than a full picture of what everyone knows for sure about what they’re working on. This constrains their generation of new possibilities and makes it more possible to work from unconscious and unspoken assumptions instead of from reality.
The lure of data
It’s fine to bring any kind of data into a planning process, as long as it doesn’t give planning an aura of being realistic. It’s only realistic when conscious and unconscious, spoken and unspoken assumptions are questioned. Platitudes about keeping things “based on data” make planning feel realistic, but isn’t. Planning that feels realistic isn’t unless it’s based on questions, actions, and learning.
Leader questions
It’s fine for leaders to share their questions, as long as everyone else does also. The more questions generated, the more realistic the planning. The group never constrains its questions to a leader's questions, regardless of their regard for the leader. In fact, the more differently minded the group, the more likely they are to generate new questions that lead to new actions, results, and learning.
Using discussions to answer questions
It’s fine for people to identify what they know and assume, as long as they turn assumptions into questions. Because more questions lead to better questions and better questions lead to better results, discussion constrains the generation of more assumptions and questions. In realistic planning, we answer questions through actions, not discussion.
Agreeing or disagreeing with assumptions
It’s fine to agree or disagree with assumptions that emerge in planning, as long as they all get translated into questions. Agreeing and disagreeing cause assumptions to go unquestioned because they are affirmed as approved assumptions or are countered with opposing assumptions. As interesting or entertaining as agreement or disagreement might be they make planning more unrealistic.
Brainstorming solutions
It’s fine for a group to brainstorm actions as long as they first identify their assumptions and turn them into questions. Solutions are realistic only when they emerge from actions that answer questions. Planning is unrealistic when it is assumption-based. The trope that “there are no bad ideas” makes planning unrealistic because it inadvertently encourages assumptions to go unquestioned.
Group recorder
It’s fine for one person to take notes in the group, but not for the group. Generating a variety of new ideas is more possible when people reflectively write their own contributions. No “recorder” could possibly predict what these ideas could be. This is why everyone writes their own contributions. Because writing occurs while others talk, no one dominates or disappears. A single group recorder lowers the group’s IQ by at least 15 points because there are more listeners than talkers and talkers than writers.
Voting
It’s fine for people to identify assumptions as long as they don’t vote on which they should take action on. It is unrealistic planning to act on assumptions rather than questions. It doesn’t matter how well-promoted or defended assumptions seem. Only questions are worthy of actions. When it comes to what people work on, people vote with their feet—not with dots—signing up for what they commit to doing.
Practice basics
Curiosity
Curiosity allows us to transform the compost of planning assumptions into rich gardens of planning questions.
Curiosity is interest that emerges from knowing that there is always more to know about anything than we already know for sure or imagine. It is appreciating uncertainty as a prime asset in a realistic life.
Our questions express our curiosity. Curiosity is why we know what’s real and what’s imagined, which is to say what isn’t real. Without curiosity, we wrongly assume assumptions are reality.
Even though curiosity is an innate ability from birth, it can go undeveloped even through an entire lifetime. Suppose we’re programmed in school to seek incentives for having all the answers and avoid disincentives for having all the questions. In that case, our capacity for curiosity will go undeveloped, leading to all kinds of unnecessary personal and collective planning fails.
In planning meetings, people with a developed sense of curiosity are obvious because they uncover unconscious and unspoken assumptions, question assumptions, and answer questions through actions rather than discussions. They prefer to find out or try out something new rather than try to prove their assumptions right through discussion.
People with undeveloped curiosity discuss, debate, and divide over unquestioned, unconscious, and unspoken assumptions. The good news is that because our brains are neuroplastic, we can train our brains to develop curiosity at any point in our lifetime. Immersing ourselves in a culture of curiosity accelerates and deepens this capacity.
Unimaginable unknowns
Sometimes groups run into problems they have no idea how to navigate. None of their assumptions or questions have helped them move forward to co-create new results. They can no longer work from local experience, knowledge, or expertise. They can’t even imagine other assumptions or questions.
These are non-locally solved problems that have been solved before by people elsewhere. The group has no idea that other people outside the group might have already solved these puzzles. They could be technical problems that experts in medicine, law, science, engineering, business, and economics have solved.
Unless relevant experts are in the group, the group cannot even imagine the kinds of assumptions or questions non-local experts might have. These are their unimaginable unknowns.
Things move forward the instant someone voices and posts an assumption that no one has ever solved this problem yet, or the opposite that somewhere has likely solved this problem before.
The group can then translate these assumptions into questions and answer them by finding out whether anyone has solved or made progress on their problem. They might discover they have expert resources resident in their organization or community or through their second and third circle social network connections. Of course, with AI, it’s infinitely easier for a group to find out if specific problems have been solved by anyone before.
As long as groups do realistic planning, the boundaries of their resources are unlimited. Their ability to care for the wellbeing of all expands exponentially.
Architecture of engagement
Collaborative engagement in planning is the process of building a shared mind. Shared mind in a group of people is a single, ever-changing space that everyone contributes to and draws from to make plans work.
A shared mind is a visible space, like a virtual whiteboard, where everything a group generates is captured and assessed. This allows everyone to build on what everyone else produces. The basic contribution and collaboration media are cards on whiteboards.
We use whiteboards for posting everything, building on each other’s gifts as well as sharing resources and success stories.
Everyone writes on cards and speaks aloud all of their contributions. This makes it possible for everyone to build on everyone’s ideas in an attitude of yes-and. It prevents dominating and disappearing.
Everyone keeps generating as many options, knowing more options lead to better options. There are no discussions because these prevent the generation of options. People new to the group are instantly onboarded with zero email forwards involved.
Gatherings
The distinction between meetings and gatherings is about formality and informality.
When we do realistic planning in a group of any size and invitation of any scope, it has more of a feel of informality. The architecture of informality includes giving people the freedom to talk about what they want to talk about, to come and go when they want, and if there are things to do, to do what they want to do.
Gatherings embody the spirit of the four principles in Open Space Technology: Whoever comes is the right people; whatever happens is the only thing that could have; whenever it starts is the right time; and when it’s over, it’s over.
This contrasts with the formality of meetings where participants are seen unfavorably for coming “late” or leaving “early.” People are free to talk about whatever the agenda permits and, if agenda items are scheduled, within the assigned timeframes. As much agency of choice people have in gatherings, people lack in meetings.
We can assign specific or parameter times for when gatherings will open and close, leaving people free to come and leave earlier or later. Because groups always do asynchronous work on whiteboards, conversations and work are never restricted to synchronous collaborations.
We do not assume, as we do with meetings and other conventional structures, that people who come early and stay late to synchronous work are more dedicated or virtuous than those who do not and instead do more asynchronous work. Actually, some asynchronous contributors could make better use of their time and the time of others than some synchronous contributors.
Gatherings don’t have prescriptive agendas because each group decides what it will focus on as it progresses along its planning pathway. Their focus is intrinsically unpredictable, with knowing from experience that with the four framework conversations, whatever happens is the only things that could have.
It is good practice for a group’s first work together to learn the four conversations in order. After that, they can work on them in any order, sequentially or concurrently. People can peel off in pairs or triads to work on specific things, or the group can work as a whole. The intelligence and power of the framework is the intelligence and power of swarm self-organization.
Pathway gatherings
In gatherings, people come together to plan for what matters to them. In Pathway gatherings people use the four Pathway Conversations™ to guide their work together. They don’t discover their shared path as much as they co-create it. The future is not a given. The future they have is the future they create by engaging their gifts together.
Pathway gatherings range from a couple of hours to a couple of days. People easily learn the framework in doing the first iteration through the conversations in 90 minutes. There are no prerequisite skills or knowledge people need beforehand. They learn by doing and seeing immediate results.
Setting the stage for gatherings is usually done by a coordinating group that works through the gatherings design elements of inviters, invitees, and invitations. They decide on the logistics of where contributions and work will be captured on whiteboards. They become or support gatherings facilitators because they are trained in the framework.
Invitations can be framed in the language of possibilities, intentions, or questions. Inviters are often trusted informal and formal leaders—usually a collective of three or more people known for their personal commitments to the focus of the invitations.
Invitees can include people who want to learn more, context experts on the ground, and technical experts related to the focus of gatherings.
The more cognitive and social variety, the better. It’s wise to make sure any known network weavers are invited to gatherings and possibly to the coordinating group. It also helps to invite the natural formal and informal storytellers—because there will be success stories to tell and spread.
The framework promises that people who use it discover how personally and collectively transformative it is. It seems so simple that it shouldn’t work, but it does. If it sounds like magic, that’s because it is.
Invitations
People contribute to realistic planning through invitations. Invitations are asks that leave people free to respond with yes or no. Invitations are in contrast to assignments and the gaslighting coercion of “voluntelling” people into assignments disguised as invitations.
We invite people to gatherings, work groups, and celebrations of success stories. We invite them to pair on the four conversations.
Invitations communicate valuing the gifts of others. They are expressed in the language of asks and offers.
Efforts spread when the invited become inviters rather than assuming others will do invitations to engage the gifts available. Invitations are horizontally distributed rather than vertically centralized.
When we invite people to something, we don’t assume they’re too busy or available. We ask for whatever time, talents, and resources they want to make available.
We don’t invite people as “representatives” of organizations, communities, or entities speaking and listening for others. We invite them as individuals speaking and listening for themselves. They can and will if they have the appetite and aptitude to invite others.
Invitation language in gatherings includes references to encouraging the invited to be inviters. This makes RSVPs that much more important so that we prepare for those who will participate. We include language such as: If you will join us, RSVP saying you will, and if not, RSVP saying you won’t or simply don’t respond to the RSVP. This is what it means to ask people to be honest about their yes or no.
The four permissions
When we want people to discover new possibilities, they will do so when they feel free to do so. There is no evidence that giving people the constraints of rules makes them more generatively curious, creative, and collaborative.
Giving people permissions animates their freedom which is significant because the more freedom people have, the more agency and consciousness they have. This means they have more choices and care more.
These are the four permissions we give work groups doing realistic planning.
If you’re not sure if you should talk an idea aloud or type it first, feel free to do either
If you’re tempted to discuss or argue about something, feel free to keep creating more cards
If you think consensus is important, feel free to post ideas regardless of agreement from others
If you think of a good story to tell about something, feel free to just keep creating more cards
The more unfamiliar these permissions are to people, the more practice it takes for them to become fluent. Working with others who gain fluency quickly helps accelerate their learning curves.
Confronting people with their freedom is essentially an unlearning process that questions people’s learned assumptions about how group planning works. The permissions release old, unproductive, and costly habits.
Freedom replaces the constraints of anxious or resentful compliance. Only people with the freedom to contribute their gifts can be realistic together.
The compost of assumptions
We grow rich gardens of questions from a rich, ever-churning compost of assumptions.
Everyone has them in the forms of opinions, speculations, and positions. We construct the fictions of opinions from all things imagined. In unrealistic planning, we act on them and call them our “plan.” It’s driving with our eyes closed.
Not ironically, in realistic planning, we encourage people to have even more—new and different—assumptions. That’s the advantage of a group with a variety of assumptions. In the simple power of engaged curiosity, we translate our assumptions into questions. We especially identify and question our assumptions behind our assumptions.
In any group working on what they care about, there are three distinctions of assumptions: conscious and unconscious, spoken and unspoken, and questioned and unquestioned.
Unconscious, unspoken, and unquestioned assumptions are constraining structures; conscious, spoken, and questioned assumptions are liberating structures.
Conscious assumptions are those people are aware of before being asked. They are top of mind and easily expressed as explanations of why people think, feel, or do what they think, feel, or do.
Unconscious assumptions surface when inquired about. They shape people’s actions and interactions without them knowing it. They are invisible hands of self-created fate. They could come to mind for people when someone asks why they think, feel, or do something.
They are the fictional narratives people construct to explain choices, essentially predicting the past.
Groups can find themselves stuck because of their unconscious shared and individual assumptions—about themselves, their world, and the future. They remain constrained by these until they surface and question them.
Spoken assumptions come out in conversations. Unspoken assumptions get acted out in conversations. For every spoken assumption, there could be dozens unspoken. The more a group assumes one person should talk at a time and everyone should sit and repress their potential contributions, the more unspoken assumptions it is constrained by.
Questioned assumptions are assumptions turned into questions. Unquestioned assumptions are confused for reality. Confused groups don’t get far, and are vulnerable to division by assumption.
The consensus myth
In realistic planning, we are most productive together when a prime intention is different-mindedness, not like-mindedness, variety, not consensus. Our intelligence as a group is swarm intelligence. Consensus is emergent from variety. More leads to better.
We don’t waste time trying to manufacture consensus on our learnings, assumptions, questions, or actions. Agreement on our pathway of actions flows from mindful collaborative consideration of practical factors in sequencing our questions. Everyone decides what actions they will take on.
Transparency of everything on the whiteboard keeps everyone and everything in sync.
Not only does striving for consensus on everything get in the way of better, it prevents, slows, and delays better–better learnings, assumptions, questions, or actions. Better is more feasible, affordable, and productive.
When any group begins generating ideas, the first several can easily be the worst the group produces. This is expected and necessary to spark better ideas by generating more ideas. Further ideas can be variations, contradictions, and alternatives to previous ideas. Anything that gets in the way of generating more ideas prevents the maturation and convergence of ideas.
The classic ways of groups getting in their own way are through discussing and debating any ideas that have emerged, on the assumption that coerced consensus makes planning more realistic or productive.
Trying to conjure or coerce consensus on any one or two ideas prevents the maturation and convergence of ideas into better ones. It also creates the social and metabolic costs of tensions that reduce the group’s collective mindfulness, intelligence, and trust.
When we see groups bogged down in more talking than doing, it’s precisely when they are preventing better ideas by trying to come to consensus on existing ideas.
When we engage groups in planning coordinated collaborative actions, one of the four permissions we offer is: If you think consensus is important, feel free to post ideas regardless of others’ agreement.
While some people get it immediately, others require a few kind reminders because this is so foreign. They have spent most of their lives in conversations and meetings, thinking consensus is always critical.
What isn’t helpful is giving groups inaccurate and counterproductive platitudes like, “Don’t judge any ideas because there are no bad ideas.”
More varieties of ideas come about because we are assessing all ideas. Many can and will be bad ideas, so more ideas are critical to better ideas.
What would be more accurate and useful would be something like: We will have bad, worse, good, and better ideas, and it doesn’t matter because only through the quantity of ideas will we increase the statistical probabilities of better ones.
Better ideas intrinsically attract agreement because they are more mature and convergent.
If we work well enough, we will reach ideas that require no voting that divides the group into winners and losers because everyone sees their obvious utility. If ideas need to be tested, the group simply does whatever experiments they can to generate even better ideas.
When groups do well, they do not argue to agreement. Consensus becomes the natural by-product of an intelligent, mindful process. As their collective consciousness expands, so does their weaving one mind from a variety of threads.
Intuition
Leaders are sometimes encouraged to work from intuition—to go with their gut. This could be because they are incredibly experienced or incredibly naive.
When people in organizations and communities enter new, uncharted territory, their naive or experienced intuitions can be excellent forms of assumptions that they turn into new questions that will keep them realistic.
One of our questions could be about whether our new territory is someone else’s familiar territory, in which case, our actions would be finding something out, and then perhaps trying something out. One form of this question is: Are we the first human beings to ever encounter or attempt to achieve or solve this?
Both experienced and naive intuition have value, which is why we make sure people with the most and least experience are invited to realistic planning efforts.
Once again, variety raises the collective IQ of a group, no matter how familiar or unfamiliar the territory. Being ethical implies cultivating the imagination that considers the seen and unseen possibilities of our significance, the consequences of our actions. In a curiously conscious world, every act is an act of possibility and impact.
Right questions at the right time
A realistic plan is a pathway of actions we engage in to answer our questions in order.
A pathway is similar to a timeline in that it visualizes the dynamic sequential order of actions, but distinct because no timeframes are assigned. A pathway simply shows the order of actions. The order shifts every time we generate new learning from the results of our actions.
Order depends on urgencies, dependencies, resources, and opportunities.
Urgencies mean actions need immediate engagement to minimize or prevent further issues, risks, or costs.
Functional dependencies mean specific questions can only be answered after others are. Opportunities means we have situations where we can answer questions through actions. Available resources mean we have what we need to act on our questions.
Because actions' actual start and end dates are relatively unpredictable, we don’t have to assign precise dates or durations to actions. We start the next actions on the pathway when the previous ones are complete. This way, there are no gaps between actions as the next seamlessly follow the previous.
When we place an action on the pathway, we place it where we decide to start it relative to actions we’re beginning earlier and later. The order of actions mirrors the order of questions.
This means we don’t have to create assumption-based start and stop dates or times for actions. We do what we can next with what we have. This sustains a steady flow of momentum into continuous new results and new learning from these results.
If someone feels anxious about pathways not being timelines, we simply ask them to use the pathway to generate more assumptions, questions, and actions. They soon realize that this is a more productive use of their time than worrying about complying to fictional timelines.
The most realistic assurance we give them is there will be zero delays in doable actions. We will always work from the rigor of our dynamic pathways. What we don’t do is join them in unrealistic planning based on anxious or obnoxious assumptions. We stay fully committed to being question-based and realistic.
We always work on the planning priorities of our pathways. Our priorities are what we’re working on now and next on the pathway.
Choreography
If we’re not working from assumptive timelines of actions, we’re working from mindful attention to what’s actually going on with our planning pathway. We make this possible with shared whiteboards where everything in the pathway cue and progress is always visible to everyone.
Every pathway is structured in three agile progressions of actions: To Do, Doing, and Done.
On the To Do list are actions that need to be started in sequential, agile order. When someone starts work on an action, they move it from To Do to Doing. When they complete it, they move it from Doing to Done.
People who have signed up for actions that are dependent on the completion of previous actions can mindfully check in with people as they are Doing previous actions to time beginning their next actions on the To Do list.
This makes seamless choreography of actions possible. Getting more people engaged in an action if that’s possible accelerates the completion of actions from Doing to Done, accelerating the start of next actions.
This is a just-in-time framework of timing next actions based on reality in contrast to a just-in-case framework based on assumptions. We replace mindless assumptions with mindful communication of asking and telling.
Predictive estimates and speculations on when an action will begin or end, or how long it will take are mindless assumptions. Mindful attention to when things are actually beginning, completing, and how long they actually take is reality. Reality-centered choreography is faster, more affordable, and effective than unrealistic choreography.
Working with what we have
We have a saying that, in the kitchen, we don’t cook with what we don’t have. We only cook with what we have.
This sounds realistic because it is. It is based on reality, not imagined assumptions otherwise. It is not the norm in planning done by people in deficiency-focused organizations and communities obsessed with needs and gaps.
If someone assumes the group, organization, or community needs specific resources to make larger impacts, they can put that with the rest of the assumptions. It would be unrealistic to invest time and talent chasing resources on the basis of assumptions. It would be realistic to generate and question even more resource-related assumptions.
In realistic planning, we work with what we have to do the doable. If someone argues that something should be done next based on assumptions, we turn these into questions and engage actions to answer them.
If someone argues that the group could have greater impact with resources it lacks, they can post any associated assumptions, questions, or actions and move forward on any. If they work with others in the group to pursue financial resources, everyone else can simply keep working on actions supported by the group’s actual resources.
We don’t postpone the doable because we have deficiencies. We do zero waiting to do what we have resources and opportunities for.
Solutions
In unrealistic planning, we begin with solutions because we think we have to predict our way into the best possible future. We incorrectly assume planning is about having all the right answers.
Solutions are assumptions, what we imagine will make something better. In unrealistic planning, we act on our assumptive solutions. Unrealistic plans are timelines of actions dedicated to accomplishing solutions.
No matter how much predictive optimism, enthusiasm, or desperation we have about a solution, it is still an assumption distinct from reality. If we want to work from reality instead of assumption, we would translate our assumptions into questions and answer our questions through actions.
In realistic planning, we don’t discuss, debate, or vote on assumptive solutions. We list them with the rest of the emergent assumptions and quickly turn them into questions. We only brainstorm solutions because we want to generate as many varieties of assumptions as we can so we have as many varieties of questions as we can.
We don’t research to prove any solutions worthy or unworthy of resources or actions. We don’t do research to “test” assumptions as hypothetical solutions. We do research to answer questions.
The research we do is action to answer our next questions. We discover solutions based on what works from question-based actions–from what we find out or try out.
People like reality-based solutions because they know they will work precisely because they’re aligned with reality rather than imagined.
The prime design flaw in brainstorming
In classic brainstorming mythology, people in groups think up ideas, vote on them, and attempt to put the winners into action. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable exercise in generating and curating solutions to problems or plans to goals.
It does have one prime design flaw. Whether old or new, ideas are based on all kinds of unquestioned assumptions—including all the celebrated winners and forlorn losers. As assumptions, winners have as many risks as losers.
Groups flounder or fail by working from assumptions rather than questions, especially when unpredictability is a constant.
It doesn’t matter how united or divided people get over ideas. It doesn’t matter how many eye rolls or drum rolls ideas evoke. It doesn’t matter how reasonable or unreasonable they appear. It doesn’t matter if ideas are supported or unsupported by data, self-proclaimed experts, or leaders. They are still assumptive.
One way to make brainstorming effective is for groups to identify the assumptions behind any and all generated ideas. They then translate these assumptions into questions. Rather than voting on assumption-based ideas, they would answer their questions with actions like research and experiments.
They would not act on ideas because this is equivalent to acting on assumptions. Acting on assumptions is an effective way to sustain the status quo. Acting on questions creates new possibilities.
They would certainly not get bogged down in discussions to vote or decide how to move forward with “winning” assumption-based ideas. Discussion is rehashing what we already know and only what we don’t know — expressed in questions — can build new results.
They would move forward with the power of questions.
Unpredictables
One reason why groups do unrealistic planning is because they assume they need to assumptively predict their way into the future they want to see.
In realistic planning, groups are not interested in assumptively predicting an intrinsically unknowable future. We know uncertainty is a constant and a prime asset in our generating questions that make planning optimally and ultimately realistic.
No matter how many assumptions we could have in planning, there are always more unknowns than knowns—more unpredictabilities than predictabilities.
On the short list of unpredictables, there are:
What resources and time we will have to work with
How change will happen by us and to us
What new questions and actions will emerge
How long actions will take
What results will come from actions
Who else will want to join us
What we will accomplish
How we will fail fast, often, and well
What new learning and assumptions will emerge from our results
When people in a group insist that the group defines predictable outcomes, we encourage them to post these as assumptions with the rest of the assumptions. The actions we engage in will not be based on any assumptions. They will be based only on the questions we turn assumptions into.
Power of imagining
The paradox of imagination in realistic planning is that groups flourish when people liberate and engage their imaginations in crafting new assumptions.
We give our imaginations vast spaces of freedom to expand and deepen. We imagine other varieties of hopes, concerns, and expectations. We imagine the possible implications of the options imagined. We invite people to imagine assumptions about the impossible they would love to see possible.
An incredible number of problems we continue to see in organizations and communities persist and resist unrealistic planning because we lack the imagination to expand our assumptions and, therefore, our questions.
The more we imagine future prognostications, possibilities, and potentials, the richer our assumption compost in the garden of questions.
This is particularly significant when a group wants to be careful about the future it creates that will have unpredictable impacts and ripples beyond their consciousness into other generations and geographies beyond their own.
Imagination is an effective way to expand our planning assumptions and questions, particularly when scenario planning—generating multiple possible pathways to a variety of possible future scenarios. When planning is preparation, imagination is a powerful media for forming new questions that matter.
The more scenarios and details of scenarios we imagine, the more assumptions and questions we will have for moving forward in realistic actions and results.
Imagining what could happen in the future expands, diversifies, and deepens our sense of assumptive hopes, concerns, and expectations.
The nonsense platitudes urging people to “be realistic” in planning often shut people’s imaginations down, unproductively constraining their assumptions and questions, and results. Being realistic in planning has nothing to do with limiting imagination, but with engaging it. The ethics of realistic planning is engaged curiosity through engaged imagination.
Top-down assumptions
In most organizations and communities, business as usual is still top-down. People are divided into power haves and have-nots.
Aside from the immense constraints of this model, people on both sides sustain it because of how it serves their needs to be superior or innocent. Both are defenses against the intolerability of uncertainty by people who only know unrealistic planning.
According to this mythology, the assumptions, questions, and actions of people at the “top” are more worthy of unquestioned compliance than those of people “below.” It’s an uncanny fiction in organizations where people assume hierarchy is intelligent much less in communities where no one is in charge over everyone else. If everyone assumes this fiction is fact, planning remains expensively unrealistic.
This is what happens when we hear people lament over the fact that people at the top have thrown tens or hundreds of millions of dollars at a problem that resists change, which means it resists unrealistic planning.
It’s simply the natural consequence of unquestioned assumptions. There are so many tragic stories of avoidable large scale disasters when so-called junior people in organizations were censored and threatened to turn the assumptions of their so-called senior people into questions. It’s what dictators do to divide people and make them more powerless.
If the culture shifts enough in the direction of realistic planning, people lose fear of being disloyal to their “superiors” because they turn everyone’s assumptions into questions. The better people get at questioning their own assumptions, the better they get at questioning anyone else’s assumptions.
In realistic planning, top people don’t have to create “safe spaces” of “trust” so people will question assumptions. People will do so when they see its value in making planning realistic.
It’s fine for anyone in organizations and communities to have top-down assumptions like vision, direction, priorities, mandates, policies, solutions, metrics, success indicators, milestones, goals, objectives, or strategies.
We simply post these along with other assumptions and translate them into questions.
We waste no time or talents discussing or debating any of these assumptions. We do nothing to come to consensus on them. We put zero effort into assigning people or resources to them. We have no interest in putting any timeframes on any of them. They’re just more assumptions we translate into more questions.
Project success
In unrealistic planning, project success is often a compromise of sorts. Because of this factor called reality, we have to keep revising our definition of success because our original definition was a cluster of nested assumptions.
In realistic planning, we decide a project is complete when we achieve as many success stories as we have time, talents, and resources for. After completing projects, everyone is free to join other projects.
What any project could achieve with what’s available is intrinsically unpredictable. No assumptions about predictability are reality. Reality is our questions, actions, and learnings from results.
People are always free to join or leave groups working on projects. Even when a group agrees to close out a project, some people from the project can continue with related or other projects.
When people join projects, we don’t demand they commit to them for any prescribed durations. We engage whatever time, talents, and resources people bring to the project.
This is why it is unrealistic for a group to commit to outcome assumptions when what they have to work with is unpredictable.
This contrasts top-down projects where leaders command and control project time, talents, and resources for specific assumed outcomes. This is unrealistic planning because these leaders work from assumptions rather than questions.
Projects do not succeed because we’re operating from enough assumptions. They succeed to the degree we stay aligned with reality through our questions, actions, and learnings.
Storytelling
Realistic planning makes success stories possible. They always have some quality of serendipity because they are intrinsically unpredictable.
Humble or dramatic, success stories shift the narrative culture of organizations and communities from cautious to courageous. Mindsets shift from victimhood to agency, self-interest to caring, and consumers to contributors.
If interest in me is the first floor of collective planning, and interest in you is the second floor, the third floor is interest in us. The third floor is the space of the most expansive vistas and views. Success stories are the lifts to spaces of new perspectives.
Storytelling happens in learning conversations when we talk about the efforts, results, and insights from our actions.
Stories well-told engage people in what we did, what we ran into, how we responded, and what resulted. It is rich in curiosity and imagination details. They illuminate, connect, and provoke people in discovery of new possibilities.
Depending on the time available, stories can be 1, 2, or 5 minutes long. The most important element of storytelling is giving listeners insights into the thoughts and emotions of the characters in the story—from beginning to end. The less a story is told chronologically, the more interesting the story.
It is good practice for people to keep building and sharing story portfolios which could include stories of things working and things not working—both valuable to people in other organizations and communities.
Stories well-told spread learning, releasing larger unpredictable impacts. Storytelling is a vital asset in creating the future we want to see.
Group dynamics
Magic of alignment
When people come together in planning, they can bring fragmented, unaligned perspectives, positions, and priorities. These can be conscious or unconscious, spoken or unspoken, questioned or unquestioned.
They can bring different gifts of assumptions and questions about problem diagnosis and solutions. These can be soft, pliable differences or sharp, unresponsive differences.
The Pathway Conversations™ framework gets a group instantly and continuously aligned. Aligned means literally and figuratively on the same page where nothing is hidden, non-transparent, or secret. Alignment is velocity and value.
We use alignment tools like whiteboards rather than anti-alignment tools like emails to coordinate work in groups.
Email was never designed as a group collaboration tool. It keeps information dysfunctionally fragmented and inaccessible to the whole group and all who join it. Shared spaces like whiteboards keep information optimally available and connected.
Aligned groups work productively and efficiently from shared perspectives, understanding, priorities, and directions. Alignment creates an atmosphere of a group’s confidence in its own collective wisdom and courage.
Aligned groups work with greater velocity and depth than fragmented groups. In fragmented groups, everyone has their own spoken and unspoken knowns, unknowns, emotions, and motivations. Being fragmented sustains the status quo, even when everyone gives lip service to how terrible or intolerable they find it.
Alignment optimizes the realistic direction and choreography of realistic planning. It emerges from shared spaces and conversations. It cannot be commanded top-down. It comes from the group working in unison, where no one is in charge and everyone shares responsibility for the whole.
The variety advantage
Without exception, everyone brings talents and gifts to the planning table. It doesn’t matter what their generation, geography, gender, or genetics. The assumption that the talents and gifts of some are more meaningful and valuable than those of others is simply naive.
There are people with a strength in generating new, different, and opposing ideas. They are valuable in actions conversations.
There are people with a strength in taking initiative without permission or forgiveness. They are valuable in taking actions to answer questions.
There are people with a strength in curiosity. They are valuable in questions conversations.
There are people with a strength in worrying or wishing. They are valuable in assumptions conversations.
There are people with a strength in discovering new patterns in data and unearthed treasures of insights. There are people with a strength in noticing obvious and hidden consequences of actions. They are valuable in learning conversations.
There are people with a strength in inviting, including, and engaging others. They are valuable in actions conversations.
The principle here is that heterogeneous, differently-minded, and differently-gifted groups outperform homogeneous, like-minded, and like-gifted groups.
The more free people feel to contribute their talents and gifts, the more we become aware of them. The more people feel valued for their talents, the more they contribute to new results.
A variety of strengths is not necessarily correlated to visible differences in that people with visible differences can be like-minded, and people with visible similarities could be differently-minded. These distinctions factor into whether planning is more realistic or unrealistic.
Entrusting
When people come together in planning together for the first time, they don’t have confidence in their shared potentials. Confidence is trust. Groups with vital and vibrant self-trust work with the courage to discover, try, do, achieve, and learn new things. They operate by trusting the power of questioned assumptions.
Without this trust, they barely sustain the status quo.
If the smartest person in the room is the group, people inside and outside the group don’t yet trust the group because they don’t yet know the group as a group. Knowing individuals in a group doesn’t mean we know the group because the group has its own emergent life and narrative arc distinct from its individual members.
Naive leaders use this reality as an excuse to take power away from people, incorrectly assuming that with fewer choices, people will make better choices. These leaders become contributors rather than controllers as the group learns to trust itself—one new conversation at a time.
The group’s self-trust expands and deepens when people entrust each other with their gifts, talents, time, and treasures. Treasures include the tangible, such as physical and economic resources, and the intangible, such as knowledge, experience, and care.
Entrusting is giving without the requirement of return. It is generosity rather than reciprocity, barter, or trade.
The more people entrust each other with their personal resources, the more the group’s self-confidence develops.
When we see groups floundering and failing, it’s usually obvious that the group’s self-confidence is underdeveloped because people take as much as they can from the group as consumers instead of giving as much as they can as contributors. Realistic planning optimizes the development of entrusting, and as a result, trustworthiness.
Freedom
Engaged curiosity is possible when people feel free to decide what they will do in planning. No one waits to be told. No one tells anyone what to do. We want everyone to have as many choices as possible.
Only with freedom of choice are people’s contributions trustworthy. As Peter Block suggests, our yes is meaningless without the freedom to say no.
It is functionally impossible for a group to be realistic if people are expected—or worse, incentivized—to be dishonest or duplicitous.
There are sometimes people who are accustomed to delegating work to others. They are used to telling people when they can talk in meetings by calling on them or demanding their voice. They assume that people do their best without choice. There is no evidence for this assumption, in fact the opposite is true.
In action sign-ups, everyone signs up for their own action commitments. They can invite people if they want others to take on or join in on any actions. This is not the gaslighting of “voluntelling” people anything, but authentically inviting people and giving them honest choice in the invitations. No one trusts bullies, and for a culture of trustworthiness, everyone can be a doer and inviter rather than a unilateral decision maker and delegator.
People can feel free to work asynchronously as well as synchronously.
They can also free free to say something or nothing, do something or nothing, discover something or nothing, collaborate on something or nothing. No one decides what anyone else will say, do, discover, or collaborate on. Everyone is responsible for themselves.
It is a child’s dream that everyone else is responsible for them. It is the adult’s reality that everyone is responsible for their own engagement of gifts and talents.
Power dynamics
In the social architecture of conventional organizations and communities, people are divided into power haves and have-nots. The haves assume they are entitled to take choices away from the have-nots. The have-nots assume they have to give away their choices to the haves. These assumptions are further scaffolded by deeper, often unconscious, unspoken, unquestioned assumptions about the intrinsic, untrustworthy, flawed nature of human beings.
Everyone is complicit in this social contract because it relieves the have-nots from the anxiety of freedom and rewards the haves with entitlement to unearned privileges.
The power haves assume the authority to control meetings, including being the ones who raise any questions for discussions. The power have-nots assume they are limited to the choices of compliance or non-compliance.
In the social architecture of bottom-up meetings, there are no power divides. Everyone shares responsibility for the conversations and resulting actions. Everyone is responsible for raising questions related to what everyone cares about. There is no top-down hierarchy where what some people care about is intrinsically more important and worthy of conversation and action than what others care about.
In top-down meetings, questions are restricted to the few generated by the power haves. Restricting questions restricts new possibilities—and the likelihood of authentic engagement and shared accountability.
In bottom-up meetings, everyone is invited to generate and work on questions because more questions lead to better questions. Better questions are new questions.
This is why the fastest way to maintain the status quo is with power-dividing top-down meetings, and the fastest way to a future distinct from the past is with power and responsibility sharing meetings.
Respect
Respect is giving people freedom to engage their gifts of learnings, assumptions, questions, and actions. Disrespect is denying people this freedom.
Respect is inviting and encouraging everyone to have assumptions, turn them into questions, turn questions into actions, and turn actions into new results and learning.
Disrespect is demanding people accept what the majority, leaders, or their consultants declare as “reality” in disregard or denial of their reality. It is demanding that people comply with the assumptions of power haves in denial of theirs. It is demanding people answer the questions of the majority, leaders, or their consultants in denial of theirs. It is demanding people do the dictates of what the majority or leaders decide in denial of what they want to do.
Disrespect is the foundation of unrealistic planning. In every realistic planning gathering, we operate from the political act of respect what people care about and bring to the table.
Network weavers
In any gathering, some people come to be entertained or reassured as well as people who come to contribute. It doesn’t matter how many people come to contribute. Some of those who come as consumers or complainers might get involved in work later, or never. Everyone is invited to join or start work groups.
Connecting early contributors accelerates expanding and deepening of the group’s results and impacts, which is to say spreading rather than scaling engagement. The more connected early contributors are, the faster their stories organically build and spread.
Early contributors are connected by network weavers. These people informally or formally derive joy from connecting people with common stories, assets, interests, or opportunities. They do this through the accessible media of text messages, emails, phone calls, and intended and accidental conversations.
Network weavers connect early contributors, next contributors, and later contributors. The more network weavers there are in a group, organization, or community, the less the requirement for unaffordable and ineffectual top-down “change management” strategies.
When we see organizations and communities transform, it's because of the obvious and hidden connective activities of network weavers.
Redirecting
People who were not fans of unrealistic planning take quickly to realistic planning. They appreciate the simple power of the conversations, the way they align the group and immediately bring about new results.
Others who were devotees of unrealistic planning need practice and proof to accept the efficacy of realistic planning. They are skeptical of things unfamiliar. More significantly, the idea of taking responsibility for their contributions—the polar opposite of the innocence of compliance—creates resistance to the implied uncertainties.
They feel uneasy with uncertainty because they haven’t yet learned how to translate the assets of uncertainties into questions. This is why they would resist change because change implies uncertainty. It is why they harbor a love-hate relationship with the status quo.
As they begin to take and share responsibility in small steps, they discover the power of their gifts of learnings, assumptions, questions, and actions.
Others in their groups make this possible by redirecting them from discussion to generating more learnings, assumptions, questions, and actions. They make this possible by redirecting them from waiting to be told what to do to being invited to sign up and do what they want to do to contribute to new actions and new results.
Redirection has the emotional tone of kind invitation. It is not engaging or empowering because these must be choices by people, not unkind, colonistic impositions on them. These are invitations, not parent-child rule-impositions, pontifications, or lectures.. It is expanding people’s choices so they can choose with optimal freedom and responsibility.
Discussion groups
Whenever people come together around what they care about, if there seems to be a critical mass of people who prefer discussion of ideas and positions over generation of contributions, we invite them to discussion groups.
It is fine that they have this preference. Discussion protects them from the responsibility of freedom.
The framework isn’t for everyone. It is for people who like to engage with curiosity rather than discussive certainty. People who come to be entertained or reassured might not be interested in contributing to the conversations. It doesn’t appeal to them if they are unfamiliar and as such sources of intolerable uncertainty.
We can proactively invite people to discussion groups at the beginning of a gathering if we know we will have people with this preference, or respond during a gathering where we notice people showing up with this preference.
People who are accountable for their leadership in meetings are prone to be discussers. It effectively relieves them from an intolerable sense of responsibility. They prefer the innocence of blame to the anxiety or guilt of responsibility. Even though they might give lip service to “change” they could be guardians of the status quo.
We don’t shame, blame, or otherwise colonize the discussers. We give them a safe space where they can do what they prefer, while allowing everyone else to engage in the framework. Everyone wins.
Some of them will join when they learn to trust work groups engaging the framework. Again, everyone wins.
Emotions
When people come together around what they care about, what they care about could be at odds with what’s happening in their world or life. This creates uncertainty.
Because of their personal and social development, people with developed curiosity flourish in uncertainty. People with undeveloped curiosity flounder in uncertainty. They get emotionally triggered by the explicit and implicit, spoken and unspoken uncertainties.
People can feel anxious, frustrated, hateful, resentful, confused, lost, irritated, overwhelmed, pessimistic, cynical, worried, helpless, or any variations of these. These can manifest in a variety of unproductive and divisive attitudes, actions, and interactions.
Realistic planning allows them to shift from victimhood to agency. The ability to translate the uncertainties of assumptions into the realities of questions depotentiates uncertainty as an emotional trigger for them. Engaging their gifts in the four conversations is intrinsically curative.
We don’t shame or blame people for their uncertainty-triggered emotions because these are all learned and only occur in the absence of engaged curiosity.
We don’t coerce people through emotional intelligence or regulation training in order to “fix” them and their disapproved emotions. We don’t invest in expensive or unaffordable culture-building or team-building programs, designed to get people to feel differently in order to do differently.
There is no space in the framework for people to defend, discuss, or debate any emotions that surface.
These emotions are all welcome as assumptions that we translate into questions. The framework is a superbly safe space for anyone to express anything they feel. We don’t want to lose any emotions as potentially valuable assumptions for questions.
People feel respected by having their emotions treated as assets, not proof of disloyalty, moral failing, cause for social isolation. People have more potential for engagement when they feel respected for however they feel. Respected people are simply more trustworthy than disrespected people.
Polarities
Assumptions come in opposites. That’s why they can be the source of unresolved, unaffordable, and unproductive either-or divisions.
While someone voices an assumption that the future will be worrisome with threats, someone else voices an assumption that the future will be bright with possibilities. While someone voices an assumption that power needs to be more centralized for control, someone else voices and assumption that power needs to be more distributed for freedom.
Other assumption polarities feature divisions between stability and change, global and local, self-interest and common good, consistency and adaptability, and conservation and innovation. The linguistic structure of polarities is either-or. We turn polarities into possibilities in the linguistic shift to both-and.
Every polarity has upsides and downsides. Upsides and downsides could be learnings or assumptions, which are posted in their respective areas and turned into questions. The simple act of noting that each polarity has benefits and costs brings people together on the same side of the planning table, in contrast to people debating over which polarity is superior because it only has upsides and the opposite choice only has downsides.
Groups quickly learn how to listen for polarities and work them into the framework as assets for progress.
Leaders and informal influencers can weaponize polarities in unrealistic planning or turn them into realistic planning assets. As groups mature in self-trust, polarities become opportunities for coherence rather than incoherence.
Leadership
Leadership is essential to unrealistic planning because the leader directs people in the process. People assume their only hope for direction and alignment is being dependent on leaders.
In unrealistic planning, leaders—and “their” people—assume leader assumptions are superior, and are therefore entitled to controlling conversations and actions.
In realistic planning, leaders participate as peers in groups working from the framework. It’s fine if they “model” good participation but the group doesn’t work from people as models—they work from the framework.
Along with others, formal and informal leaders act as inviters, network weavers, and storytellers. When the group needs technical expertise leaders have, the group invites leaders as contributors.
Leadership is not essential in realistic planning because the group follows the framework rather than assumption-based leaders. Leaders no longer have to have all the answers—just to invite people to generate all the questions. They no longer have to have all the answers—ever.
Leaders can get in the way of realistic planning in many ways, making it unrealistic.
They can bully people into agreeing and complying with their unquestioned assumptions.
They can unilaterally make decisions and take actions on their unquestioned assumptions or those of leaders they report to.
They can present data to give unrealistic planning an aura of being realistic.
They can give lip service to change while doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.
They can make people feel blamed and shamed for not “meeting” the leader’s or group’s goals or objectives.
They can sustain unrealistic planning practices like brainstorming solutions, promoting discussions, and using note takers and voting.
They can rush people into next actions after results, skipping learning, assumptions, and questions.
They can be the sole source of questions in meetings, demanding answers through discussions.
They can be the ultimate decider of meeting agendas and assignments—telling people what they can and can’t care about.
They can make people who question their assumptions to feel unwelcome and uncomfortable for their disloyalty.
In realistic planning, people share responsibility instead of outsourcing responsibility. They do not wait for realistic leaders. They do not operate from the child’s wish for a protective parent. They do what they can to be as realistic in their planning as possible.
Planning contexts
Strategic planning
There has long been a fair amount of magical thinking about strategic planning in organizations. People assume it will cure all ills and protect the organization from all manner of harm.
Organizations do strategic plans because doing so is mandated by their funders, investors, boards, or executive teams. 80-90% fail because they are structured from unrealistic planning principles and practices. They fail to cure ills and protect from harm because they are based on assumptions about the future rather than reality in the present.
Unrealistic strategic plans are based on assumptions like missions, visions, values, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, goals, objectives, and budget projections. These become the focus of all kinds of time and talent wasted in discussions. Packaging strategic assumptions in a brand-attractive slide deck is simply wallpapering cracked walls. Their intrinsic flaws become evident as soon as people try to implement them.
The problem with strategic assumptions is not that people generate them, but that they narrow them down and prioritize them instead of generating more and turning them into questions.
In realistic strategic planning we encourage people to come up with as many missions, visions, values, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, goals, objectives, and budget projections as they can. The more the better because the more questions these will generate and more questions lead to better questions.
People work together in projects whose results continuously refresh the organization and its functions in their learning, assumptions, questions, and actions. The framework supports both long-term and short-term planning as well as organizational, functional, and cross-functional planning. It also supports organizational planning in collaboration with supplier and client partners.
Innovative and ethical leaders who want to make their strategic planning realistic can be trained in the framework and invite all plan-coordinating people to be trained as well.
Community planning
There can be many possible catalysts for people coming together in communities. Problems are common entry points.
Problems can be related to economics, politics, physical environments, workforces, or quality of life. They can be related to perceived, fabricated, or actual crises or threats. They could be related to the aspiration of visions and dreams.
Envy of how other communities perform better falls somewhere between problems and aspirations. Envy is a panoply of emotions that could precipitate community planning, along with fear, hate, hope, determination, pride, compassion, empathy, conflict, dread of extinction, pity, blame, anxiety, and victimhood. It doesn’t matter what the emotional origins of community planning are.
One emotion is not intrinsically more or less effective than others. Communities can begin where they are.
Planning in communities can be hosted by formal organizations leaders and informal groups. It could only take any two people in a community to host a Pathway gathering around anything they care about.
Before, during, and after community plans are constructed, many organizations in the community operate from their own plans. These organizations include for-profit companies, non-profits, government and non-government organizations, and other community organizations, programs, and services.
Community plans can by design work to align the plans of organizations in the community or produce a single community plan that organizations can align their plans to. The more organizations in the community do realistic planning, the easier it is for the community to do realistic planning together.
Community plans could invite participation by everyone in the community, or by people in specific community contexts such as neighborhoods and professional sectors. They could also invite people across segments and sectors.
As with any kind of change, planning successes inspire and spread at the speed of network weaving and storytelling. Formal and informal leaders and early contributors are vital in making possible a best possible future for all.
Scenario planning
When people in organizations and communities construct a single “plan” it is only one possible future scenario. Having one scenario could make sense in a fairly predictable future. When the future is less predictable, it is more realistic, which is to say wiser, to have at least two planned scenarios—for example one favorable scenario and one unfavorable.
We do scenario planning to be prepared for possible scenarios, meaning optimizing favorable scenarios and minimizing unfavorable scenarios. Not planning is one scenario, and as such, it is not a realistic plan.
A scenario is something we imagine could happen in an uncertain future. Each scenario has its own unique iterations of learnings, assumptions, questions, and actions.
We create scenarios by imagining simulations of what could happen in the future. As reality changes while and because of our efforts, we will discover and plan next scenarios.
The scenarios we plan next year could be slightly to significantly different than those we’re planning this year. The ones we plan in 3-5 years could differ from those we plan for the next 1-2 years.
We learn our way forward into optimizing favorable and minimizing unfavorable scenarios. This is proactive and adaptive planning as learning.
The future we get together is the future we realistically plan together. Organizations and communities that flourish in the future will learn their way forward, one realistic conversation at a time.
Epilogue
The future we have together is the future we create together. A shared future is intrinsically unpredictable because we have no way of knowing how we will come together.
Organizations and communities are living systems. As such, they are composed of unpredictable, nested, consequential relationships.
The four Pathway conversations create the conditions for relationships of mutual respect, responsibility, and rewards. We learn them quickly because, since kindergarten, we’ve known how to make assumptions, ask questions, answer questions with actions, and derive learnings from the results of our actions.
Together, they keep planning realistic. Realistic works every time. We like realistic because it feels doable and affordable. We resist unrealistic.
The Pathway Conversations™ framework turns unrealistic planning on its head. It works because it has nothing in common with unrealistic planning.
The argument that the four conversations “aren’t really planning” is the argument that a plan based on fiction rather than reality has more of a chance of succeeding. This is functionally impossible.
Unrealistic planning makes planning more complicated than it needs to be. It adds unnecessary steps that impede progress and incur preventable costs. Instead of contributing our gifts, we have to jump through all kinds of hoops just to land where where we started.
We have to waste time rehashing what we already know in discussions to arrive at consensus that constrains the quality of our questions, actions, results, and learnings. We have to awkwardly decide if we should share what we think, feel, or know. We have to endure people dominating and disappearing. All of these are currencies of unrealistic planning.
The most industrious social insects, animals, and ecosystems are so because they engage in simple frameworks. The planet and all its life forms would implode if everything in nature made things more complicated. Consciousness favors the simple.
Simple is smart. The simplicity of engaged curiosity works. That’s the power of realistic planning.
About the author
Jack Ricchiuto writes and teaches about the possibilities of personal, organizational, and societal change. With Jane Rogan, he is co-developer of the Pathway Conversations™ framework and co-founder of Third Floor Design.
Nationally and globally, he is respected as a master in the transformational power of new questions to create a future distinct from the past.
For over 45 years, Jack has coached leaders and guided teams in organizations across dozens of business sectors as well as in urban, rural, and aboriginal communities.
As a 38-time author, Jack's writing has focused on psychology, planning, leadership, community building, storytelling, and entrepreneurship.
Trained in psychotherapy, complex systems change, and noetic medicine, Jack has taught leadership in undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate programs including Harvard Business School, UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt, Kent State, and John Carroll Universities.
Jack lives in Cleveland's historic neighborhood, Tremont. His given African name is Sekou, Wise man. Jack's personal interests include writing, cooking, improv, gardening, and hiking.
Sincere gratitude to Jane Rogan who co-authored the current iteration of the framework and its groundbreaking practice implications.
For more about Jack, visit Jack Ricchiuto.com. For more about our work in realistic planning, visit ThirdFloorDesign.org.