I really love to plan. I like to plot. I like to think of myself as a mastermind, build the whole ecosystem, the steps, the action steps, what needs to be done after what, the whole checklist.
But a plan is only as good as its execution. If middle management, or lower management, or the people actually doing the job are messing up, something was done wrong by top-level management for things to be fucked up on the bottom tiers.
Every time I trace a dropped project backwards, it never actually ends at the editor who missed the deadline. It ends at a handoff I never defined, a brief I never wrote, or a schedule nobody owned. The bottom of the org chart is where top-level mistakes go to become visible.
