[dkarl]

Same here, I've never worked at a place that did too much planning. However, I've been at a lot of places that wildly overvalued plans.

"Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

The culprit is usually someone who sees their job as checking boxes off a list. In extremely complex situations, box-checkers can be valuable to help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks, but everything goes to shit when you elevate people like that to any position involving the word "manager." Project manager, product manager, people manager -- it's a disaster to try to reduce these jobs to checking boxes. Immediately they'll start to say things like, "Why did we spend so much time creating a plan if we're not going to follow it?" They'll create deadlines for finalizing plans and insist that everything after the deadline has to robotically follow the plan. They see their job as 80% making sure every box on the plan is ticked and 20% stopping you from doing anything there isn't a box for. If they do that and the project fails, they point fingers at people for not adding all the right boxes to the project plan according to the schedule for making boxes.

Good planning isn't about checking boxes. It's about forcing yourself to consider all aspects of a project, crystallizing your plan at a certain point in time, and periodically reconsidering and re-crystallizing your plan on a cadence that makes sense for the project.