For decades, writing a business plan was almost a mandatory ritual for anyone who wanted to start a business.
Considered a sign of professionalism, maturity and preparation, it was taught in business schools, required by banks, investors and competitions, and was seen as synonymous with serious planning.
Already in 2005, Steve Blank, father of modern entrepreneurship, stated: "business plans do not survive the first contact with the client"
Incredibly, many of these organizations are still outdated.
The document, typically 20 to 50 pages, included a comprehensive market analysis, strategic definitions, detailed organizational structures, and above all three- to five-year financial projections.
In its logic, the business plan is based on the premise that the environment is, at least to some extent, predictable: if it is analyzed in sufficient depth, if it is rigorously modeled, if it is well thought out, the behavior of the market can be anticipated and a solid path to success can be built. This logic made sense in an industrial context, where innovation cycles were slow, access to data was limited, and trial and error costs were very high.
In a context of less information, with fewer competitors and key decision-makers and higher barriers to entry, the photo was enough. Today we need iterative and dynamic planning (the video). Flexible strategy. Planning
But the problem is not the effort to think strategically. On the contrary!
The problem is that the traditional business plan format is rigid, costly in time and effort (although now chatgpt assembles it with a prompt), static and based on unvalidated assumptions.
And that, in a world like today's, can be a critical disadvantage.
A. The problem of rigidity
The business plan is not simply a set of ideas: it is a linear, formal, closed document. It is prepared once, often with months of work, and is rarely updated in depth.
In general, it is applied for its purpose: to obtain investment, a loan, encourage us to start, expose us to experts, and then it ends up thrown in a drawer.
Its very nature (structured, logical, sequential) promotes the illusion that once written, it becomes a roadmap. But this structure is precisely what makes it unadaptable.
It's like drawing a map without having set foot on the ground. When reality is stepped on, that map quickly becomes obsolete.
B. Does not survive the first contact with reality
Steve Blank explained it forcefully: No business plan survives the first contact with the client. This phrase, inspired by the famous Mike Tyson quote (Everyone has a plan until they get hit), reflects a common experience: entrepreneurs who spend months writing a perfect plan, only to discover that the market does not respond as they expected. Javier Megías sums it up as a fictional exercise done at the desk. Steve Blank calls hypotheses "riddles."
C. Based on unproven assumptions
A serious defect of the classical plan is presenting hypotheses as if they were facts. Megías warns against the capital sin of giving for certain unvalidated statements. Nassim Taleb, from the epistemology of risk, would say that we are facing a case of illusion of knowledge. This leads to overestimating the ability to predict, ignoring the complexity and non-linearity of the environment.
D. Rigidity in environments that require adaptation
Henry Mintzberg criticized it already in the 90s: Strategy is not written in a plan, it emerges from interaction with reality. In changing markets, this rigidity not only does not help, but it can lead the entrepreneur to insist in the wrong direction.
E. Paralysis by analysis
The process of writing a detailed plan can become an excuse for not taking action. Perfectionism, the search for certainty, and the fear of uncertainty push many entrepreneurs to overplan instead of going out and validating.
Many give up even before, when they understand that they must write a document.
Be careful with those tips! The person who offers them has not read or prepared for a long time.
F. Blindness to surprise
Taleb warns: what really changes the game is not what we plan, but the unexpected.
Black swans (highly improbable events, but with great impact) cannot be anticipated in any Excel. And in a volatile world, shocks multiply. Extensive plans create a false sense of control that can be dangerous.
On the other hand, we can prepare and position ourselves in an antifragile way. Combining validated and resilient models (customer-funded, with low fixed costs and assets) with continuous exploration and ambidextrous learning organizations.
Steve Blank put it in a revolutionary way: a startup is not a small version of a large company.
You are not running a proven model, but actively pursuing that model.
This completely changes the rules of the game. Trying to direct this search with a fixed plan is like trying to explore a new continent with another's map.
A. Customer Development (Steve Blank)
Emphasize early validation with the client. He goes outside the building to confirm (or refute) each critical assumption. The process is structured in four phases: discovery, validation, customer creation and company construction.
B. Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
Introduces concepts such as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and the Build Measure Learn cycle. Instead of building the perfect product, a minimal functional version is released to test real hypotheses and adjust quickly. It is the combination of Customer Development (A) and Agility.
C. Business Model Canvas (Alexander Osterwalder), Lean Canvas (Ash Maurya), Scalabl® Virtuous Model Canvas
A visual canvas that replaces the plan as the main tool. Each block represents a hypothesis that can and should be adjusted with market evidence. Steve Blank adopted it and popularized it to replace the classic plan.
At Scalabl® we incorporate the operating model and 6 rules that validate that the models are resilient and funded by clients to the model.
D. The New Business Road Test and The Customer Funded Business (John Mullins)
Extraordinary in its vision that it is not plan A that works but plan Z. And in the financing models with clients. Entrepreneurship reference at London Business School, he criticizes the VC model and explains how raising investment is not the only way.
E. Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Bill Aulet)
An MIT reference, he proposes a 24-step model to launch ventures, starting from the business plan, and starting from iterative planning.
F. Agility (multiple authors)
Principles and values ??that arise in manufacturing (Toyota), then IT (Agile Manifesto) and then derive in business with the contribution of Eric Ries. They conceptually encompass the methodologies, tools (e.g. scrum, kanban) mentioned in this section.
All aligned to abandon the long-term plan and carry out continuous and iterative planning with the actors at the center and based on their insights.
F. Effectuation (Saras Sarasvathy)
He studied how expert entrepreneurs think. They do not start from a fixed objective, but from what they have at hand, and advance by making small, acceptable bets. Its logic is flexible, adaptive, antifragile. They do not seek to predict, but rather to build with what they control.
G. Discovery-Driven Planning (Rita McGrath & Ian MacMillan)
It proposes that new businesses should not be planned as extensions of the past, but as hypotheses to be discovered. Budget is released in stages, as critical assumptions are validated. It is an incremental vision based on empirical learning.
Clayton Christensen
Disruptive innovation, which today multiplies and increases in speed, almost never fits into a traditional plan. The plans ignore this type of uncertainty.
In The Innovators Dilemma, a classic, he makes it clear: successful models emerge from non-linear processes.
Geoffrey Moore
In Crossing the Chasm, he shows that the transition from early market to mainstream is neither predictable nor linear. Therefore, a plan that assumes progressive adoption is often a mirage.
There is a lot to learn. "Entrepreneur who does not read is at a tremendous disadvantage," I have insisted since 2015.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In Antifragile, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, he severely criticizes the illusion of control.
Extensive plans create false security and make us fragile in the face of the unexpected.
The true entrepreneur needs structures that benefit from volatility and unpredictability, not collapse before it.
It's not just the business plan, the organizations we know as companies are also transforming. They no longer respond to the needs for which they were created.
Not for now. As I explained at the beginning, even sectors that should be references such as academia and banks have not understood it. Governments continue to copy paste. And companies cannot abandon the dynamics of 5-year plans (every year). They need help.
In certain specific contexts, an adapted version of the plan may make sense:
* For experienced entrepreneurs who have already validated their model and are seeking institutional or bank financing.
* In highly regulated sectors or with formal requirements (for example, health, public education, energy).
* As a post-validation synthesis tool, to present to external stakeholders. The pitch deck is widely used, a reduced version more oriented by the validated business model.
* In already established companies, as a short-term operational planning instrument (1 year or less), and with periodic review (increasingly periodic)
My recommendation? Use modern methodologies and abandon the business plan.
If we need it for any of the previous cases (it has happened to me, for example, when opening my company in Hong Kong and other markets), rest on ChatGPT or Gemini, feeding it with the extensive research or deep research option and the validated inputs from our companies.
The fundamental thing is to remember that:
The plan must be a living, iterative document, built on real data, market learnings and not on assumptions or illusions.
From prediction to continuous learning
Planning remains crucial.
But it is no longer about writing prophecies. Nor formulate plans and execute based on guesses. We need less fiction and more contact with reality
Today's plan is updated every day, with active listening and continuous experimentation, always with business actors at the center.
We do not rule out strategic thinking, quite the opposite. We simply modernized the tools with which we carry it out.
Because continuous learning is the fuel of business in our era.
Not the money anymore, not the investment.
