Most Western OD consultants treat planning as gospel. The detailed master plan, the MS Project file, the color-coded spreadsheet — having one isn’t just useful, it’s treated as proof you’re a serious professional. Plans define deliverables, assign roles, lock in timelines. Case closed, right?

Wrong. Planning isn’t the neutral, universally-agreed-upon good we like to pretend it is. It’s a cultural belief system wearing a business suit — and it quietly assumes the future is knowable enough to schedule.

Let’s look at  the closing of Hormuz and its impact on supply-chain planning. The honest truth was that no one could tell you what could happen let alone build a 12-month roadmap around it. Lack of planning  wasn’t wrong because of miscalculation . It was wrong because the premise — that this was a plannable problem — never held.

I’ve seen the same thing lately with AI. Executives ask for a three-year plan for “AI impact on the organization,” and I understand the instinct. But the answer may be  that nobody knows what AI capability looks like in three years, let alone how it reshapes a given business. Building a detailed long-term plan on top of that many unknowns isn’t rigor. It’s theater.

That’s when it hit me: a plan isn’t always a tool. Sometimes it’s a security blanket — a way of pretending the future is more legible than it is.

A client in Egypt later handed me a saying that named exactly what I was seeing:

“Isal el rafik kabl el tariq” — Ask who you’ll travel with, not which road you’ll take.  To a lot of the people I work with, planning isn’t discipline. It’s a fixation — and sometimes it’s a way of avoiding the harder, less comfortable work of building the relationships and reflexes that let you adapt when the map turns out to be wrong.

That was a hard pill for me, a naturally disciplined planner, to swallow. But once I did, the shift was real: instead of asking clients “what’s the plan,” I started asking “who do you trust, and how fast can you move together when things change.” That question mattered more than any timeline.

Once I stopped assuming that Germans, Americans, Brits, and Dutch clients shared the same relationship with planning as everyone else — and started noticing where that assumption quietly broke down — my results got dramatically better across India, Taiwan, Israel, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: some cultures believe the world is controllable enough to plan their way into the driver’s seat. Others assume the world is too unpredictable for that — Hormuz and AI being two good recent proofs — and put their faith in the people beside them instead of the map in front of them.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether planning works. It’s whether we’ve been honest about which problems are actually plannable at all.