Why Good Plans Fail When the Other Side Doesn’t Follow the Rules
A plan can look brilliant on paper and still fall apart in the real world. Sometimes the problem isn’t effort or strength — it’s that the situation behaves nothing like you expected.
Imagine you’re playing a game of tag and your team comes up with the perfect strategy. You decide who will chase, where everyone will stand and which direction you expect the other team to run. Then the game begins and the other team does something completely different. One person doubles back, another hides and someone else runs off in a direction nobody predicted.
Your plan wasn’t necessarily bad. It was built on assumptions that turned out to be wrong.
That happens in sport, science, business, school and even history. We often make plans by imagining how other people — or even animals, systems and environments — are likely to behave. When reality doesn’t cooperate, the smartest response isn’t always to try the same thing harder. Sometimes we need to change the way we understand the problem.
When there’s no obvious person in charge
We’re used to groups having leaders. Schools have principals, sports teams have coaches and companies have managers. If you understand who is making the decisions, it can be easier to predict what the whole group might do.
But some systems work differently. They are decentralised, meaning there isn’t one single leader controlling everything.
Think about a flock of birds suddenly changing direction in the sky. There isn’t necessarily one bird at the front shouting instructions. Each bird reacts to the movement of those around it, and together the flock appears highly organised.
Ant colonies can work in a similar way. Thousands of ants can search for food, respond to danger and build complex nests without one ant sitting in an office giving everyone orders.
This can make a decentralised group surprisingly difficult to disrupt. If there is no single leader, removing one individual might make very little difference. The others simply keep going.
You can see a similar idea in technology. If an entire online service relies on one computer, that computer failing could bring everything down. If the work is spread across many computers, however, one failure may not stop the whole system.
There is no guarantee that decentralised systems are better. They can be messy and harder to coordinate. But they can also be flexible — and flexibility can be a powerful advantage.
Stronger doesn’t always mean better
When two sides compete, it is tempting to assume that the stronger one should win. But strength is only one part of the equation.
Speed matters. So does adaptability, knowledge of the environment and the ability to change direction quickly.
Imagine an adult trying to catch a small child during a game. The adult is almost certainly stronger, but the child might be quicker, harder to predict and able to squeeze through spaces the adult cannot. The advantage depends on the situation.
Sport gives us plenty of examples too. A highly skilled team can struggle when an opponent plays in an unexpected way. A player who keeps repeating the same strategy may be easier to beat than someone who changes tactics throughout the game.
The same principle can apply to studying. Imagine preparing for a test by memorising exact answers from a practice sheet. That strategy might work if the real questions are almost identical. If the test asks you to apply the same knowledge in a new way, however, memorisation alone may not be enough.
A stronger strategy is usually one that can survive a change in circumstances.
A failed plan can still be useful
There is another mistake we sometimes make when plans go wrong: assuming failure means we achieved nothing.
Failure can contain valuable information.
Suppose you build a paper aeroplane and it immediately dives into the floor. You could make the exact same plane again and throw it harder. Or you could examine what happened. Was the nose too heavy? Were the wings uneven? Did you throw it at the wrong angle?
The failed flight has given you evidence.
Good problem-solvers use that evidence to update their approach. They ask: What did I expect to happen? What actually happened? Why was there a difference? What should I change?
That is very different from simply repeating the original strategy with more force.
Scientists do this constantly. An experiment that fails to produce the expected result can still be extremely useful because it reveals something about the original idea. Coaches change tactics during a match. Engineers redesign prototypes. Businesses change products when customers behave differently from what they predicted.
Changing your plan doesn’t necessarily mean the first plan was foolish. It can mean you have learnt something new.
Plan for reality, not the version you hoped for
Perhaps the biggest lesson is that good planning requires more than deciding what you are going to do. You also need to think about how the rest of the system might respond.
What if the weather changes? What if someone is absent? What if your opponent does the opposite of what you expected? What if the problem itself behaves differently once you try to solve it?
You cannot predict everything. But you can create plans that leave room for adjustment.
That is why adaptability is such a useful skill. The goal isn’t to have a perfect plan that never changes. It is to notice when reality is telling you that the plan needs to change.
And sometimes history gives us particularly strange examples of what happens when that lesson is ignored.
So what does any of this have to do with emus?
Episode 1 of FYP: For You Podcast tells the story of an unusual Australian problem involving farmers, soldiers and a very large number of emus.
A plan was made. The humans had technology, organisation and a clear objective.
The emus had other ideas.
What happened next is the part we’re saving for the podcast.
Listen to Episode 1: The Great Emu War to discover how one of Australia’s strangest historical episodes became a surprisingly useful lesson about strategy, assumptions and adaptability.
A better feed for curious minds. Stories and ideas worth your attention.
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