Every team walks out for a match with a plan. A shape, a strategy, a clear idea of how they intend to win. And within twenty minutes, in almost every match ever played, that plan has met an opponent who has their own ideas, and something has to give. The team that wins is rarely the one with the best plan. It is the one that reads what is actually happening on the pitch and adjusts to it fastest — that sees the plan is not working, abandons it without ego, and finds the thing that does. I keep returning to this, because the planning culture I was trained in taught me to revere the plan, and football taught me that the plan is only the opening move.
This is not an argument against planning. A team with no plan is worse than a team with one, and I have written elsewhere about how much preparation matters. It is an argument about what the plan is for. The plan is not a script to be followed regardless of events. It is a starting position, a shared understanding of intent, from which the real work of adapting to reality begins. The leaders who understand this hold their plans firmly and their attachment to them loosely, and that combination is rarer than it should be.
The plan meets the opponent
There is a famous military observation that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Football proves it several times a match. You planned to press high, but the opponent is playing through your press, so the plan is now a liability. You planned to control possession, but they have conceded possession deliberately and are picking you off on the break. The plan was reasonable when you made it; it was made against an imagined opponent, and the real one is behaving differently. Continuing to run a plan that the actual circumstances have invalidated is not discipline. It is a failure to notice.
Projects encounter their opponents too — the market that moved, the technology that behaved differently than expected, the stakeholder whose priorities shifted, the assumption that turned out to be wrong. The plan was built against a model of the world, and the world is always somewhat different from the model. The question is what you do when you discover the gap. The weak response is to defend the plan, to insist reality is wrong, to keep executing a strategy that the circumstances have already defeated. The strong response is the footballer’s: notice quickly that the plan has met its opponent, and start adjusting before the cost of the original plan compounds.
Reading the game is a skill, and most plans neglect it
The best players have a quality commentators call game intelligence — the ability to read what is actually happening, to see the pattern of a match as it develops, to sense where the space is and where the danger is before it fully forms. This is a distinct skill from technical ability. A technically gifted player who cannot read the game is far less valuable than a moderately gifted one who reads it superbly, because the reading is what tells you when and where to apply your ability.
Project management, as it is usually taught, badly underweights this skill. We are trained extensively in how to build the plan and barely at all in how to read whether it is still working. We learn to construct the schedule, the risk register, the stakeholder map — all the artefacts of intention — and almost nothing about the live perception that tells you the situation has changed and the artefacts are now describing a world that no longer exists. The leader with real game intelligence is constantly reading the actual state of the project against the planned state, noticing divergence early, and treating that divergence as the most important signal available. The plan tells you what you intended. Reading the game tells you what is true. The second is worth more.
Adjusting without abandoning
There is a balance here that the good manager strikes and the poor one misses in both directions. Adapt too little, and you stubbornly run a beaten plan into the ground. Adapt too much, and you have no plan at all — you are simply reacting, changing shape every few minutes, giving the team no stable basis to perform from. The skill is in adjusting the plan without abandoning the intent: keeping the strategic goal fixed while changing the tactics used to reach it.
The good manager at half-time does not usually tear everything up. They make a specific, considered adjustment — a change of shape, a different instruction to two players, a shift in where pressure is applied — aimed at the specific problem the first half revealed, while keeping the broader plan intact. This is the model for project adaptation too. When the circumstances change, the question is not “do we keep the plan or throw it away” but “what specific adjustment does this specific change require, and how do we make it while preserving everything that is still working?” Wholesale abandonment is as much a failure of reading as stubborn persistence. The art is the surgical adjustment, repeated as often as the game demands, in service of an intent that holds steady underneath.
Ego is the enemy of adaptation
The deepest obstacle to reading the game and adjusting is not analytical. It is emotional. Abandoning a plan you committed to, especially one you announced and defended, requires admitting it was not right, and that is hard. The manager who staked their reputation on a particular approach finds it painful to change it, and so changes it later than they should, after the cost of persistence has already mounted. The plan becomes a matter of pride, and pride is a terrible reason to keep doing something that is not working.
I have seen this on projects far more often than I have seen genuine analytical failure. The leader can see the plan is not working — the signals are there, the divergence is visible — but changing course means conceding that the original approach, which they championed, was wrong. So they wait, and rationalise, and give it a little longer, and the cost compounds. The footballer’s lack of ego about the plan is the quality to envy here. The good player does not care that the planned move did not work; they have already moved on to finding the one that will. Holding your plan loosely is, in the end, an emotional discipline as much as an analytical one — the willingness to be wrong about your own plan quickly, and to care more about the result than about having been right.
What to take into your own work
Adaptability is the quality that separates plans that survive reality from plans that shatter against it. A few things worth carrying across:
Treat the plan as a starting position, not a script. It is your opening move, made against an imagined opponent. The real one will behave differently.
Invest in reading the game, not just building the plan. The live perception of whether the plan is still working is a distinct skill, and most of us are badly undertrained in it.
Adjust surgically, not wholesale. Keep the intent fixed and change the tactics. Both stubborn persistence and constant reinvention are failures of reading.
Hold the plan loosely enough to be wrong about it. The hardest part of adapting is emotional — the willingness to abandon an approach you championed, quickly, because the result matters more than being right.
The plan you walk out with will meet its opponent within the first twenty minutes, on a pitch or on a project. What happens next is the real test — not whether your plan was good, but whether you can read that it is no longer working and find the thing that is. Plan thoroughly, then watch reality even more thoroughly, and be ready to change everything except where you are trying to get to.
This piece sits alongside Momentum: Why Projects, Like Matches, Are Won in Phases and Risk Management at World Cup Scale.
Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project leader and former Australian Project Manager of the Year, sharing practical lessons from major projects, events and complex stakeholder environments.
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