Episode Transcript
Every organization we work with is trying to balance a pretty difficult tension. On one hand, they want predictability at the early stages, when they’re planning and budgeting. On the other hand, they want adaptability as they get into the execution of things, as they discover more or as things change. Traditional project management promises predictability through control—but that quickly breaks down when the plan encounters reality. Agile embraces change, but too often, it lacks the structure stakeholders need to make commitments and manage risk.
We’ve seen too many companies try to blend Agile and waterfall, only to end up with the worst of both. Hybrid Agile often just means waterfall with standups or Agile teams buried in upfront planning. That’s why so many attempts at Hybrid Agile fail.
And that "worst of both worlds" approach creates friction at every level. Leadership wants early visibility and forecasts, but teams uncover critical details too late. Stakeholders want dates they can count on, then realize they need something different and ask to change priorities, blowing up the schedule. Teams feel caught between rigid plans that don’t match reality and reactive chaos that keeps them from making meaningful progress. Instead of building momentum, work slows down, people get frustrated, and progress feels like an uphill battle.
We've helped dozens of clients fix this problem, and now we've taken the patterns that work and turned it into an approach others can use. We're calling it CAPED, which stands for Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation, and Delivery. It doesn’t try to force Agile and traditional project management together. Instead, it balances flexibility and predictability by recognizing the difference between complex and complicated work. In this episode we'll explain how and why CAPED works.
But first, this show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company, where we help organizations get better at leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit the contact page on our website, humanizingwork.com, and schedule a conversation with us if your organization wants to see stronger results in those areas.
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CAPED is built on an important idea–that many of the hardest and most important parts of an initiative are inherently complex. Cause and effect aren’t clear upfront and understanding emerges only through experimentation—so treating this as predictable and attempting rigorous planning for it is doomed to fail.
We've probably all experienced this to some extent—spending weeks or months analyzing every detail upfront, thinking it’ll give us control over the outcome. But the reality is, the most valuable work in a project—the part that makes it innovative, competitive, or game-changing—is usually complex and emergent, not complicated and predictable.
Right–complex problems can’t be solved through analysis. Their answers emerge through experimentation, iteration, through making actual changes that show us how things work. And this has always been the source of the real tension between Agile and waterfall. Every leadership team wants more predictability. But when they try to force a rigid plan onto complex work, things break down fast.
And that leads to the key breakthrough in CAPED, what we call *Active Planning.* Instead of trying to make a perfect plan before we have enough information, we tackle the hardest, most uncertain parts of the work first *as a planning activity*. It's not just execution, it's doing work to uncover the emergent data, and to reduce risks that can't be predicted.
That’s how some of the most successful creative and engineering teams in the world operate. Take the animation studio Pixar, for example. They don’t script a perfect movie before production starts. They develop rough, “ugly early” versions and test them repeatedly, week after week, to refine the story. Frank Gehry, the architect behind some of the most stunning buildings in the world, doesn’t start with detailed blueprints. He goes through a process creating thousands of sketches and physical models, experimenting with form and structure before finalizing the design.
That’s exactly what Active Planning does. It’s structured experimentation that resolves uncertainty before we build a detailed plan. The CAPED approach follows four key phases:
1. Phase 1 is **Strategic Planning** – Where we identify the real complexity upfront before deciding to proceed with the initiative.
2. Next is **Active Planning** – as we’ve described already, where we’re running focused experiments to resolve uncertainty early, often while actually making progress on core elements of the solution.
3. Phase 3 is **Analytical Planning** – where we use what we’ve learned to develop a realistic, risk-aware execution plan, and finally
4. Phase 4 is **Iterative Execution** – where we incrementally deliver high-quality solutions while remaining adaptable to new discoveries.
And even without adopting the full model, you can get some benefit from it right now: Instead of waiting until later to deal with the biggest risks in your project, **pull complexity forward.** Start by testing the assumptions that could sink your project if they’re wrong. Pick one big unknown in your current work and ask, *How can we test this now?* That small shift alone can dramatically improve your planning and execution.
And if you want to go deeper, that’s exactly what we help teams do. CAPED is a structured way to balance complexity and predictability without falling into the Agile vs. Waterfall trap. If this challenge sounds familiar, let’s talk about how CAPED could help your team navigate it.
For more about the CAPED approach, check out [humanizingwork.com/caped](http://humanizingwork.com/caped) for an overview of what goes on in the four phases we’ve described today.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Humanizing Work show, see you next time!
