Most Business Plans Are Fiction
A detailed five-year plan projects false precision onto a future nobody can see. The document looks like rigor; mostly it is confident guessing in a spreadsheet.
I have helped build a company from hand-to-mouth beginnings into an internationally awarded agency, and I have written and read a lot of business plans. So I can say this with some affection for the genre: most business plans are fiction. Not dishonest fiction — sincere, well-intentioned fiction — but fiction all the same. The detailed five-year plan with its tidy projections is a story we tell ourselves to feel certain about a future none of us can actually see.
The danger is not that the plan is wrong; every plan is wrong. The danger is that a thick, confident document makes us believe it is right, and then we follow it off a cliff the reality in front of us was already warning us about.
Why the conventional wisdom is wrong
The conventional wisdom says a serious business needs a serious plan — the more detailed and far-reaching, the more credible. So founders produce thirty-page documents with five-year revenue curves and market-share projections, and treat the heft of the thing as evidence of rigor. But detail is not the same as accuracy. A precise projection about an unknowable future is not more rigorous than a rough one — it is just more confidently wrong, and the precision makes the error harder to question.
The five-year revenue chart is a guess dressed as a forecast; the decimal places add credibility, not truth.
The plan assumes the market, competitors, and customers will behave as written, when the only certainty is that they will not.
Energy goes into perfecting the document instead of testing the riskiest assumptions against reality.
Once the plan exists it becomes a thing to defend, so founders cling to it as the evidence piles up that it is wrong.
What is actually true
What is actually true is that the value of planning is in the thinking, not the document. The act of planning — confronting your assumptions, pressure-testing your model, deciding what has to be true for this to work — is genuinely useful. The artifact it produces is nearly worthless the moment reality starts arriving, because reality immediately begins violating the assumptions the plan was built on. The founders who win are not the ones with the best plan. They are the ones who plan in order to learn, then adapt fast when the world disagrees with them.
This is why the same founders who swear by their business plan often succeeded by abandoning it. The plan got them to start; the pivot got them to work. What mattered was never predicting the future correctly — nobody does — but building an organization that could notice reality quickly and change course without an identity crisis.
What a plan is actually good for
Planning is worth doing — as long as you hold the output loosely and use it for what it is actually good at.
Forcing you to make your assumptions explicit, so you can test the ones the whole business depends on.
Pressure-testing the model's logic — checking whether this even works on paper before you bet real money on it.
Aligning a team on direction and the few near-term moves, not on a fictional number three years out.
Identifying the riskiest unknowns to go validate next, then updating the moment you learn something real.
What we have seen
We did not build Through The Glass Creatives by executing a five-year plan; we built it by holding a clear direction, paying ferocious attention to what was actually happening, and changing course whenever reality demanded it. The detailed plans we made early were obsolete within months — not because we planned badly, but because that is what plans do. When founders bring us a thick business plan and ask us to help them execute it, the most valuable thing we can often do is help them hold it more loosely: keep the thinking, ditch the false precision, and build the habit of adapting. The companies we have watched struggle were rarely the ones without a plan. They were the ones too committed to a plan reality had already disproven.
The honest take
Plan — but do not confuse the document with the truth. The thinking that goes into a plan is valuable; the thick, precise, five-year artifact it produces is mostly fiction, and treating it as fact is how good founders march confidently in the wrong direction. Make your assumptions explicit, test the riskiest ones, align on the next real moves, and then stay awake to what actually happens and adapt without shame. The goal was never to predict the future correctly. It was to build something that survives being wrong about it — which you will be.
Sources
CB Insights — analysis of why startups fail, including building on assumptions the market never confirmed. cbinsights.com
Harvard Business Review — research on strategic planning versus adaptability in uncertain environments. hbr.org
TTGC — lessons from building our own company and advising founders.
