Skip to content
Making the Complex Simple
Making the Complex Simple
Making the Complex Simple - Research
Data map
CODA & Swipe One - Web hooks
Complexity Monsters
Better vs Complexity
Complexity readiness check list
The Process
Share
Explore

Core message

The spine of “You can’t change a plan if you don’t have a plan” can be:
Most SMEs are trying to “improve” something they’ve never actually defined or mapped.
Without a plan, everything becomes a reaction to this week’s event instead of a deliberate change to the underlying system.
The chapter – and your book – is about making that system visible, simple, and changeable.
This sets up your later material: once the reader accepts that their real problem is “no explicit plan,” PDCA, RCA, and your process feel like natural next steps rather than extra work.

Suggested narrative flow

Here is a draft structure you can expand into prose in your own voice.

1. Open with the everyday chaos

Start with a short, concrete scene from a typical SME:
The founder is answering customer queries at 9pm, jumping between email, WhatsApp, and a spreadsheet.
A supplier has missed a delivery, a key staff member is off sick, and a big client is chasing an overdue quote.
Everything is urgent, nothing feels connected.
Then pivot: “This isn’t just a ‘busy day’. This is what running a business without a clear, working plan looks like.”

2. Events vs patterns vs system

Introduce the idea that what they experience as chaos is actually three different layers:
Events: the email, the angry call, the missed order.
Patterns: late deliveries every month‑end, quotes always slipping a week, the same staff member always stepping in to save the day.
System: the way work really flows (or doesn’t) through their business – roles, hand‑offs, priorities, measures.
Make the point: when there is no plan, the owner lives at the “event” level, occasionally notices patterns, and almost never has time to work on the system itself.

3. “But I do have a plan…”

Gently challenge the common objection: “I have a plan – it’s in my head / in the business plan we did for the bank / in the strategy slide deck.”
Differentiate:
A strategy document is not an operating plan.
A mental model in the founder’s head is not a shared, testable plan.
A to‑do list is not a system.
What matters for this book is a simple, working view of how value moves from customer request to cash in the bank – one that the team can see, discuss, and improve together.

4. Why you can’t change what you can’t see

Spell out the practical consequences of not having a plan:
Every change is a guess: “Let’s hire one more person,” “Let’s buy software,” “Let’s discount prices,” without knowing which part of the system is actually the constraint.
Problems keep resurfacing because only symptoms are touched: the urgent email is answered, but the broken hand‑off that created it stays in place.
The founder becomes the system: decisions bottleneck around one person because no shared, simple plan exists to guide everyday choices.
This ties directly into your “complexity” theme: complexity grows fastest in businesses that operate purely on implicit plans and heroic effort.

5. Reframe “planning” as simplification

Many SME owners resist planning because they associate it with corporate bureaucracy. Reframe it:
The “plan” in this chapter is not a 40‑page document; it is the simplest, clearest picture of how your business actually works.
The goal is not to predict the future but to give you a stable baseline so you can change one thing at a time and see what happens.
A good plan makes decisions and trade‑offs easier, not harder.
You can hint that the rest of the chapter will show how to build and evolve this plan using a light‑touch cycle (PDCA) and better problem thinking.

6. Bridge to the next sections

End the section by pointing forward:
“In the next part, we will look at why your business probably isn’t as ‘different’ as you think.”
“Then we will introduce a simple improvement cycle you can run again and again, using your plan as the anchor.”
“Finally, we will dive into the detail of how to understand problems properly before you try to fix them.”
This keeps the reader curious and positions “You can’t change a plan…” as the foundation: once they accept this, everything that follows feels like the practical ‘how’.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ··· in the right corner or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.