Did You Plan To Fail?

I get to hear a lot of ideas and plans in my marketing & business-writing work. An idea is just a thought, whilst a plan is an idea put into actions. The usual mental note when I hear an idea or a plan is, "did he plan to fail?". Let me give you an illustration - a debtor planned to repay his creditor $1k over 5 weeks, $200 each. His idea was to split the payment into smaller, manageable portions. His plan was to negotiate with the creditor and to get him to agree. It worked. When the payment dates come, he couldn't pay one of the $200-instalments. What went wrong here? The debtor didn't plan on how he was going to get the weekly $200. His plan failed. Similar scenarios are visible in plans many make daily. Detailed planning, looking into 2nd-, 3rd-layer or even deeper layers of the sub-plans are the keys to make plans work. So, next time someone tells you he has a plan, ask if he'd already thought through it. Otherwise, Murphy will strike unnoticeably. By the way, many people have plans that are not. They could be referring to just ideas or lightly-processed ideas (which don't yet qualify as plans). Ask them, "did you plan to fail?" A simple follow-through in his "plans", asking questions expertly with the 5Ws & 1H would get you some answers.