Every plan is always a hope. The project unfolding is reality. If the project has to match the plan in order for it to be either a good plan or an acceptable project, everyone's in trouble. In the real world, the plan and project virtually never match. In fact, it is not the first purpose of the plan to predict the outcome. The first purpose of the plan is to represent the collective wishes of the project's community.

Every plan has imbedded in it a mixture of good reasoning, sound judgment, political imperative, and hopeful naiveté. Best case scenarios are no more likely to result than worst case ones. There is always some force hoping for better than worse case and some counterbalancing force raining on the prospective parade. The plan is a portrait of the planners, not of the proposed project. Once the project begins, the project provides the planners endless opportunities to adjust their initial impressions in execution. This essential job of adapting the hope to match the unfolding experience is merely complicated by the critics who jeer naively from the sidelines about what should have been foreseen. How are the critics' expectations for a worse enough case scenario different from the overly optimistic expectations they savage?

What the critics might have foreseen is that no one could have created a believable plan for anticipating the unthinkable. Some force within the "rational" community would have insisted upon a more "thinkable" scenario before they could buy in. The result is always a plan which planners know is simultaneously inadequate and satisfactory because it is the only scenario found acceptable by the sponsoring community. Thinking that such a community could have, should have, created a plan that would execute hand in glove with an unthinkable project is more dangerous than any worst laid plan. Punishing the planners for not being fortune tellers is always an easy and unproductive strategy.

Most of us didn't learn that project execution is about adapting to whatever the world is telling us needs adapting to. It gets worse if we expect each iteration of adapting to more accurately predict the uncertain future because this leaves us ever dumber rather than increasingly wise. Our plans must fail to predict uncertain outcomes, but this fact need not prevent us from dealing with uncertainty and from finding success on initially unthinkable terms. Our hopes do not have to come true for us to succeed unless we define success as a dream come true. This is a tragically narrow condition for success. If our dreams must come true, our experience must be one of either continual failure for dreaming too big or unending mediocrity for dreaming too small.

What we do when we find our initial hopes shattered by an unthinkable reality better defines success than any dream coming true. Success is always a choice hidden within different than anticipated conditions. We can forfeit this furtive satisfaction by rejecting the unsettling conditions reality offers or increase the potential for success by embracing this surprise. We can have what we wish for but never on the terms anticipated.

Critics believe your past should have been different. Cynics believe the future cannot change. Somewhere in between these two perspectives, the rest of us struggle with the terms of our success. Critics destroy their future by failing to change someone else's past. Cynics forego the future they want because they cannot believe in it. The past cannot change and trying to change the past encumbers the future. Changing the future requires hope, and a cool head as the present unsettles us.