If you’ve ever played the computer game Tetris, you’ll know how it goes: things are fine at first. Blocks drop at a manageable pace, and you can take your time placing them neatly. But as the stack grows higher and headroom becomes limited, the blocks fall faster. You’re forced to make snap decisions, and it gets harder to place them well. Mistakes compound, and suddenly, it feels like everything is accelerating towards disaster.
Today, I’ve been running training for the Get It Right Initiative, and this is one of the analogies I use to explain what happens when we don’t make time to plan.
In design and construction, as in Tetris, when we skip planning, we’re more likely to make rushed decisions. These decisions can lead to mistakes, which in turn create more problems, more stress, and even less time to address the growing chaos.
Unfortunately, in real life, the consequences of getting things wrong are far more serious than losing at a game.
Fortunately, unlike in Tetris, we do have more freedom to step back and make time for planning. Planning is the important-but-not-urgent task that prevents small issues from escalating into crises.
It might not always feel like we have that freedom. Making space for planning might mean sacrificing something else, but that sacrifice is often far less damaging than the entire plan going wrong and it being game over.