Write the Intent, Not the Plan

We spend our working lives specifying what we want from systems and almost no time specifying what we want from ourselves. And when we do try, we usually write the wrong document.

The five-year question

Ask someone where they want to be in five years and listen to the shape of the answer. Almost always, it’s a position. A title, a band, a company, a salary, a team of a certain size. Occasionally a place to live, or a number in an account.

I’ve asked that question a lot, and I’ve answered it badly myself more than once. What strikes me now is that none of those answers is actually an answer. They’re all destinations, and a destination tells you remarkably little about what someone is for.

Two people can want the same job title for entirely different reasons. One wants the authority to fix something they’ve watched go wrong for years. The other wants to stop being told what to do. A third wants their parents to be able to say it out loud. Same destination, three different lives, and the title can’t tell them apart.

Three layers, and we skip the middle one

Here’s what I think is going wrong, and it’s a mistake I’d spot instantly at work and miss completely in my own life.

Any serious intention has three layers. There’s the why: what this is for, what matters, what you’re not willing to trade away. There’s the where: the destination, the thing you can point at. And there’s the how: the route, the steps, the mechanisms.

Almost everyone writes the where and the how, and skips the why entirely. Get the promotion, move to that city, finish the qualification, hit the number. Those are destinations and routes, and between them they look so much like a plan that nobody notices the missing layer underneath.

Organisations do exactly the same thing, at scale. Richard Rumelt’s argument in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy is that a great deal of what gets called strategy is really just ambition: a vision statement, a set of goals, a destination, with no honest diagnosis of the problem and no guiding choice about what to do. Roger Martin has spent years making the complementary complaint, that companies substitute planning for strategy and produce activity lists instead of choices. One camp says we only write the where. The other says we only write the how. They’re both describing the same hole in the middle.

Which is why five-year plans have the reputation they do. It isn’t that planning is useless. It’s that we’re specifying execution against a future we can’t see. The industry changes. The company restructures. Something goes wrong at home, or something unexpectedly good turns up. A plan built entirely out of steps shatters on first contact with any of that, and because the steps were all we wrote down, we’re left with nothing. People talk about losing their way at exactly these moments, and they’re right: the route was the only thing they ever had.

I’ve used a different image for this before, writing about how we navigate IT projects. A map gives you a single predefined route, every turn plotted in advance, and it’s genuinely reassuring right up until the terrain changes. A compass gives you direction and leaves the route to you, which feels far less comfortable and holds up far better when the ground moves.

The argument I made then was that you choose by terrain. Work that’s well understood and done many times before can be mapped, and should be. Complex work in a shifting landscape needs a compass. I’d add one thing now that I only half saw at the time: whichever you’re holding, the compass has to be pointing at something. I noted then how often the destination isn’t properly defined at all, and how reliably that sets a team up to fail before it starts. A compass with no considered north is just a confident way to walk in a straight line.

A life is the least mappable terrain there is. Which makes the conventional five-year plan a map in compass country.

And when you can’t specify the execution, intent is the only stable thing you have, because it’s the one thing not being rewritten every quarter. You genuinely cannot specify the execution of your own life. So the intent isn’t a nice extra on top of the plan. It’s the only part worth writing down.

What a specification actually holds

In the work I do, an intent specification is a particular kind of document, and the discipline in it is what you leave out.

It holds the outcome and the reasoning: what this is for, what matters, what good looks like, what you’re not willing to trade away. It deliberately doesn’t hold the implementation. You specify the what and the why tightly, and leave the how open, because the team or the system doing the work will find a better route than you’d have drawn, and because the route will need to change.

I’ve written before that clear intent isn’t the same as a detailed brief, and that specifying the how in exhaustive detail isn’t clarity at all, it’s execution by remote control. The more completely you prescribe the steps, the less room anyone has to be intelligent on the way.

Now point that at a person. Written as an intent specification rather than a plan, the five-year question stops being “what job do you want” and becomes something far more awkward: what is this actually for, what are you unwilling to trade, and how would you know if you got it?

Standing in your future

There’s a practice I keep returning to, and have written about before, of standing in your own future and looking back rather than forward. Preflection, as opposed to reflection. You put yourself at some distant point, and from there you describe what happened, what mattered, what you’re glad you did.

The reason it works has nothing to do with prediction. Looking forward, we plan in steps, because steps are what the next few months are made of. Looking back, nobody narrates their life as a sequence of milestones. They talk about what they built, who they became, what they refused to give up. The vantage point changes the register from execution to intent, and it does it without you having to try.

That’s really all a personal intent specification is. Not a forecast. Not a set of targets. A description, written from the far end, of what you were trying to do with the time.

What goes on the page

I should be concrete, because “write down your intent” is easy to say and oddly hard to start.

It doesn’t want to be a document. A page is plenty, and the discipline is the same one it is at work: what you leave out. No steps, no timelines, no job titles. Three things are worth having on there.

1. What this is for. The thing you’re actually trying to do with the time, said plainly enough that someone who knows you well would recognise it as yours.
2. What you won’t trade. This is the one almost nobody writes, and it’s the most revealing of the three. A strategy only becomes real at the point it rules something out, and a life is no different. The hours you won’t give back. The kind of work you won’t take, however well it pays. The version of yourself you’re not willing to become in exchange for a better title.
3. How you’d know. A description of what it would look and feel like from the inside if this were going well, specific enough that you’d notice when it wasn’t.

Take the three people from the start of this piece, all of them wanting the same job. Written this way, the one who wants the authority to fix something ends up with a completely different page from the one who’s tired of being told what to do, and each would recognise their own at a glance. The job title never could have told them apart.

Where the comparison breaks

I want to be careful here, because the analogy is useful right up to the point where it quietly isn’t, and that point matters more than the parts that transfer.

When I specify intent for a system, I hand it to someone else to execute, and I stay outside it, able to judge what comes back. With a life, you’re the specifier and the executor and the thing being built, all at once. There’s no outside to stand in, which means there’s nobody to be honest with you about the gap except you.

Then there’s the harder one. A specification assumes a stable author. But the person who comes out the other side of five years isn’t the person who wrote it, and the writing was never the main thing changing them; the living was. So you’ll find yourself holding a document written by someone with less experience, fewer scars and a narrower view, and the question isn’t only whether you achieved it. It’s whether they were right.

And there’s no acceptance test. No release, no sign-off, no moment where something passes or fails. Which sounds like a weakness, and I’ve come to think it’s the most honest part. Lives aren’t delivered. They’re lived, continuously, and the absence of a test is what keeps you responsible for the judgement rather than letting a criterion carry it for you.

The gap you can measure

There is one thing you can check, and it’s uncomfortable enough to be useful.

On the machine side, the discipline I care most about is intent fidelity: the distance between the intent you expressed and what actually came back. Turned inward, the same question has a brutally simple form. Look at where your hours went last month, and your attention, and your energy. Then look at what you said you were for. That distance is your own intent fidelity, and unlike most things in a life, it leaves evidence.

A gap there isn’t automatically a failure, which is the bit worth sitting with. Sometimes it means you’ve drifted, and you can see it in the pattern before you’d ever have admitted it in words. Sometimes it means the specification was wrong: that you wrote down a want you’d absorbed from somewhere else and never actually examined, and the living has been quietly telling you so. Knowing what you actually want is hard enough that plenty of what we write down is borrowed, and the gap is often the first honest signal that it was.

Which is why the point of writing it is not to hold yourself to it. It’s to have something specific enough to be wrong, so that when it is, you find out.

What it’s for

None of this is an argument for more planning. It’s an argument for writing down a different thing, and far less of it.

A page about what you’re for, written from the far end, with the steps left out. Specific enough to catch you out, open enough to survive a world that won’t hold still. Held firmly, and reread not to measure progress but to ask whether you still mean it.

And there’s a reason this matters more now than it did ten years ago. Of the three layers, the how is the one being handed over. Machines are getting remarkably good at routes: the steps, the mechanisms, the working-out of how to get from here to a stated there. We have spent most of our planning energy, personally and organisationally, on precisely the layer that is becoming delegable. What’s left is the layer almost nobody writes down.

It’s an odd exercise, and I’ll admit the first time I tried it I wrote a job description by accident. But it’s the same discipline this whole series has been circling, turned around and pointed at the only subject where nobody else can do the governing for you.

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