Projections, Feedback, and Reality

Planning in the New Era

In the previous two pieces I described three modes of leadership and the instincts that sit underneath them. I want to take those ideas into a more practical arena and see how they play out in one of the most fundamental functions of any undertaking: planning.

Every leader plans. The distinction I want to draw is not between leaders who plan and those who don't, but between what their plans are built on. Assumptions. Surface-level feedback. A genuine understanding of the system. These produce very different processes, and very different results.

Built on Assumptions

The pioneer doesn't usually plan in the early stages. Survival mode doesn't allow it. There are too many fires, too many unknowns, too little stability to sit down and project forward. Planning only enters the picture once there's enough margin to consider it. And when it does, the form it tends to take is backward-planning.

He defines what success looks like, identifies what he would need to make happen to get there, and works backward to the present. This approach is exactly right when the system is known: following a recipe in the kitchen, or training for a marathon. The variables are understood, the progression is established. If the result is off, you can reasonably trace the gap back to execution: insufficient consistency, too much of this, not enough of that. The system is known. The plan is a reliable method of executing against it.

The problem arises when the same approach is applied to a problem that hasn't been solved before. A Shliach designing his Shlichus for his community is not operating in a known system. Those variables are not shared by anyone else — his specific context, his particular community, the intersection between what he carries and what they need. He can borrow ideas from others, but he doesn't yet know what will work for his community, or what form his Shlichus will ultimately need to take. He is still finding out.

But the pioneer plans as though the system is known. He begins with an imagined future, a picture of what success should look like — and constructs a path backward from that image. Because the underlying system is not yet known, that path is but a projection, a coherent-looking sequence built on assumptions that haven't been tested.

When the plan doesn't produce results, the instinct is to blame execution, and it is almost always where people go first. Not enough discipline. Not the right people. Not enough effort. But it is entirely possible that the plan was simply off to begin with.

And so the cycle repeats. A new plan is built on the same untested assumptions, and when it too falls short, the conclusion is either that the leader isn't executing well enough or that planning itself doesn't work. Neither is necessarily true. But the plan isn't the root of it. What it was built on is.

Built on Feedback

The operator brings something the pioneer doesn't. He understands that you don't always hit the bullseye on the first attempt — that you need to iterate, collect feedback, and adjust. So he does something different: he introduces the feedback loop.

He tracks what the pioneer never tracked. Financial performance. Attendance. Engagement. He pays attention to what surfaces after efforts have been executed, reviews what went well and what didn't, and adjusts his next move based on what he finds. He is watching reality and making adjustments. This is where a lot of the more sophisticated work in the Shluchim-serving ecosystem is already happening, and it represents a real upgrade from the pioneer's approach. The operator is no longer executing blind. He has data.

But it is still possible for him to miss the point entirely, and this is the subtler trap, because he is doing exactly what the playbook says to do.

The operator collects feedback and adjusts what is visible. Attendance was low, so the time slot shifts. The numbers on one initiative are flat, so resources move to another. Each adjustment is reasonable. Each is responsive to real data.

And to some extent, it works. The ticker moves. Programs improve. Real problems get resolved.

Yet at the scale where most moisdos operate today, the cost of maintaining this kind of infrastructure: the trackers, the dashboards, the cycles of feedback and adjustment — begins to feel disproportionate to what it actually produces. It is heavy infrastructure for incremental returns.

And then, in the late-night moments of introspection, the Shliach looks back at all of it against the backdrop of what this Shlichus was meant to be. And it becomes clear that this approach altogether cannot take him there.

Built on Clarity

That realization has no operational answer. There is no tracker to consult, no feedback loop to tighten, no next iteration that resolves it. The Shliach is standing in front of a question his toolkit has no answer for.

The leader catches these moments. Where everyone around him sees a process that needs refining or a team that needs upgrading, he sees through to something more fundamental — the condition on which the entire effort is built.

It is not a process problem. It is not a people problem. It is that the ground itself is wrong.

It is not a process problem. It is not a people problem. It is that the ground itself is wrong. And because he sees it clearly, he doesn't deliberate over whether to act on it. He goes there.

Consider what happened when Nestlé tried to enter the Japanese market with coffee in the 1970s. The initial efforts failed miserably. An operator-level read of that failure would have been straightforward: adjust the marketing, change the packaging, try a different price point.

But someone read the situation at a different level entirely. He saw that Japan was a tea-drinking culture with no meaningful relationship to coffee. There was no cultural foundation to sell into. No amount of optimization was going to change that.

And so, instead of optimizing the existing approach, they did something that would have looked irrational from within the operator's frame: they flooded the market with coffee-flavored candy aimed at children. Not coffee — candy. The goal was to build a positive association with the taste of coffee in a generation that had no relationship to it.

Over the course of years, as those children grew into young adults, the cultural foundation was quietly laid. When Nestlé reintroduced coffee to that generation, the response was entirely different. Japan is now the sixth-largest coffee importer in the world. Nescafé holds roughly seventy percent of the instant coffee market there.

That plan took over a decade to materialize. But it produced transformative results that the operator's approach simply never would.

When the plan serves a clarity that is already in place, everything downstream changes. The metrics are no longer tracking activity. They are tracking whether reality is moving toward what the leader already sees. The timeline can extend because the leader is not chasing quick results to validate his direction. And the plan itself becomes something an organization can run on.

This is what "built on clarity" ultimately means for planning. The pioneer's plan was built on an imagined future. The operator's plan was built on feedback from the present. The leader's plan is built on a genuine read of the underlying reality — and that is why it holds.

The difference between the operator and the leader here is not better questions, and it is certainly not a greater willingness to take risk. Without real wisdom behind it, the Nestlé move is a complete gamble. With it, it is what leads to transformational growth.

The Shliach himself has to change before the plan can

The new era of Shlichus invites us to go there: to revisit the assumptions that created the very challenges we are working through right now. This era demands transformation. But the first transformation is not programmatic. It is personal. The Shliach himself has to change — gently, systematically, and in a grounded way — before the plan can.

Only from that stance can he design the plans and the metrics that will actually capture what his Shlichus is meant to produce. What the Rebbe is asking of him.