Episode Transcript
Welcome back to the Humanizing Work Show. In our previous episodes, we introduced the CAPED approach—Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation, and Delivery—and explored Phase 1: Strategic Planning. Today, we move into Phase 2: Active Planning, where the real breakthrough of CAPED happens.
Agile techniques have helped software teams deliver projects for years. By working in short cycles, testing early, and adapting as they go, they reduce the risk of getting too far down the wrong path before discovering a mistake.
Agile is a great delivery method in software because software **has a low cost of iteration.** This makes Agile a great fit there and in other industries where it’s cheap and relatively easy to iterate. But in some fields, the cost of being wrong during execution is **so high** that adapting mid-stream is a terrible idea.
Pixar, for example, doesn’t pay A-List actors to record dialogue and render world-class animations only to discover that the story doesn’t really work. Instead, they iterate on story drafts, test storyboards and rough animations, and only finalize details when they have **real evidence** that everything is working.
Frank Gehry, the world-renowned architect, doesn’t create a detailed blueprint first. He builds models, explores different designs, and experiments **before** locking in his plan and bringing in the engineers.
They both recognize something critical: **The best way to navigate complexity isn’t to predict everything upfront—it’s to iterate before committing.**
That’s the key insight behind Phase 2 of the CAPED process: **Active Planning.**
Today, we’ll explore how CAPED helps teams resolve complexity before they execute, using techniques that are just as powerful for large-scale business initiatives as they are for movies and architecture.
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The goal of Active Planning is to **earn green on the project** by resolving the complexity identified in Phase 1. Check out Episode 145 where we covered the idea of earning green in more detail.
Most valuable initiatives start with a lot of uncertainty. Think about an ambitious project—when you kick it off, there’s no way to know exactly how everything will work. You don’t know how the market will react, whether the technology will scale, or how different systems will integrate. In Phase 1, we mapped out this uncertainty. In Phase 2, we systematically resolve it—turning unknowns into knowns. That’s how the project **earns green.**
To do this, Active Planning follows a repeated loop of **Feature Mining, Iterative Probe-Sense-Respond, and Stakeholder Review**—each cycle moving us closer to green.
We start with **Feature Mining**, a collaborative activity that aligns a team on what makes the big initiative valuable, what makes it big, and where we have uncertainty and risk. We then ask: **What are the smallest meaningful slices of work that will help us resolve the core complexity?**
Unlike traditional decomposition, where we break work into smaller and smaller tasks that lock in all of the details, Feature Mining focuses on identifying thin, **potentially releasable** slices that force us to tackle the hardest parts of the problem right at the beginning. These slices become our inputs to Iterative Probe-Sense-Respond cycles.
In **Iterative Probe-Sense-Respond**, we take these mined slices and **build them in small, real increments**. A prototype can wave its hands at the hard parts of a system—but building something small and **potentially releasable** forces us to resolve complexity in a way that actually works in practice. By focusing on thin, releasable slices, we surface hidden dependencies, integration challenges, possible false assumptions about our customers, and unforeseen technical constraints **while we still have time to adjust our approach.**
After each iteration, we bring our findings into the **Stakeholder Review**.
It’s similar to the famous **Braintrust meetings at Pixar**, described in Ed Catmull’s book *Creativity, Inc.*. Pixar directors present early drafts—not to get approval, but to **get candid feedback from trusted peers.** The Braintrust isn’t about grading progress; it’s about surfacing problems and improving the film.
Our Stakeholder Review process serves the same purpose. We involve key decision-makers, product leaders, engineers, and sometimes even end users to examine the **real** outputs of the current Probe. It’s a structured conversation to **Sense and Respond** to what the Probe uncovered.
We use the **Humanizing Work Review Process** to make these meetings highly productive, cycling through a demonstration of what was completed, then inviting stakeholders to ask Clarifying Questions, share Kudos for what they liked, and provide Comments in the form of opinions and advice on what the team should do next. The stakeholder review ends with the question: **“Should we move this item from Complex to Ordered, given what we’ve learned so far?”**
This loop repeats **until each item in the Complex domain moves into the Ordered domain**. At that point, we’ve reduced enough uncertainty to create a confident, realistic execution plan. That’s when the project **earns green.**
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This is a huge shift from traditional project planning! Many teams feel pressure to create **detailed execution plans too early**, leading to surprises and rework later. **Active Planning gives teams permission to learn first, before locking in their approach.**
In future episodes, we’ll walk through the final two phases of CAPED: **Analytical Planning and Iterative Execution**, where we lock in the details and deliver on time and on budget. If you found this episode valuable, let us know in the comments, and we’ll see you next time on the Humanizing Work Show!
