Humble Planning: How To Make Your Plans Suck Less with Maarten Dalmijn

About this session

In this talk, Maarten will introduce the concept of humble planning and why it’s crucial for succeeding with an Agile way of working and building products of exceptional value.

When faced with uncertainty, risk, and complexity, our natural response is to focus on what we know and to spend more time talking, analyzing, planning, and predicting. As a result, our plans become filled with speculation and rooted in our imagination. Our plans as an anchor stifle the ability to respond to changes. We become locked into plans that prevent collaboration, learning, and discovery.

In this talk, Maarten will show why, instead of starting with overconfident plans, we should start with humble plans: How can we encourage our teams to begin with humble plans, and what do teams need to adapt their plans as they discover and learn what’s necessary while doing the work?

The talk will cover concepts like friction, the three gaps model of Bungay, intent, intent-based leadership, humble planning, sprint goals, the fog of beforehand, and the fog of speculation.

All about Maarten

Maarten Dalmijn is a consultant, speaker, and trainer at Dalmijn Consulting. He is the author of the book Driving Value with Sprint Goals.

Maarten helps teams to beat the feature factory all over the world. Millions of practitioners have read his best-practice articles on Agile, Scrum, and Product Management. He specializes in helping companies build empowered teams to discover better ways of delivering value.

He has been working as a Product Leader. He’s focused on coaching teams to deliver the highest value for their customers. One of his hobbies is writing articles. He shares his ideas on Substack and loves learning from everyone.