Failing to Plan

Failing to Plan: How Projects Break Before They Start (And How to Fix the System)

You can feel it the moment you walk onto a jobsite that started too early.

There’s motion everywhere, but it’s not progress. Crews are working hard, foremen are making calls, the project team is scrambling, and everyone is “doing their best.” Yet the site feels like a pinball machine: people bouncing from issue to issue, waiting on answers, waiting on materials, waiting on access, waiting on a decision that should’ve been made weeks ago. It’s loud, it’s tense, and it’s expensive.

That’s what failing to plan looks like in real life. And it’s one of the most common causes of project failure because it starts the failure cycle before the project even gets a fair chance.

The “No Plan” Jobsite: Chaos That Looks Like a People Problem

When planning is missing, the job doesn’t slow down. It speeds up in the wrong direction.

Workers show up ready to work, but they don’t know where to go. They can’t get to the work because the work isn’t ready. The team tries to “make it look like the project is moving,” so more people arrive, more activity starts, and the site turns into organized confusion. Everyone is busy. Nobody is flowing.

This is the moment where the industry falls into the same trap: blaming the people. The talk becomes, “We can’t get good workers,” or “This trade is killing us,” or “The foreman can’t run a crew.” But in the conversation between Jason Schroeder and Adam “Beanie” Bean, the diagnosis is clear: the people are often failing despite their best efforts because the system didn’t set them up to win.

Why Projects Start Before They’re Ready

So why does it happen? Why do projects start before they’re ready?

Because time gets burned upstream.

Before crews ever mobilize, time is consumed by decisions, buyout, design coordination, approvals, and the back and forth that happens when leaders are still trying to align budgets, scope, and direction. That upstream time doesn’t disappear. It steals from construction time.

Then the panic sets in. The schedule looks tight, leadership feels pressure, and the project team hears the same message: “Just get it moving.”

Planning takes time, and when teams feel behind, planning is the first thing they cut. That’s the trap. When the pressure rises, the system does the one thing it cannot afford to do: it abandons the plan.

Compressed Construction Time: The Hidden Damage Done Upstream

When construction time gets compressed, the project doesn’t become “faster.” It becomes unstable.

The team starts making decisions in the field that should’ve been made in preconstruction. Constraints aren’t removed ahead of time, so crews run into walls all day long. The schedule stops being a plan and becomes a document people point at while they improvise around reality.

This is where leaders need to tell the truth: if the job needs more time, pretending it doesn’t won’t make it so. A compressed timeline without a plan doesn’t produce heroics. It produces overtime, stress, rework, quality drift, and safety risk. It breaks people and families. And if the plan requires burnout, the plan is broken.

Stop the Line: Full Kit and the Discipline to Pause

One of the most powerful ideas in this transcript is the discipline to stop.

Not stop as punishment. Stop as a production strategy.

Beanie calls out the tendency to “ready, fire, aim” and the reflex to throw the schedule out the window to “get things moving.” Jason connects it to the idea of stopping the line so you can fix the process, not blame the person. This is where Lean thinking becomes practical: if something isn’t ready, you don’t muscle through it and punish the field for the consequences. You stop, you make it ready, and you flow.

Full kit is the simplest way to describe it: don’t start work until the crew has what they need to succeed. If we wouldn’t skip civil work and pour foundations on dirt, why would we skip planning and expect stability?

Go to the Gemba: How to See the Real Problem (Flow)

Planning doesn’t live in spreadsheets. Planning lives at the work front.

Beanie describes walking the job “10 to a dozen times a day,” not to micromanage, but to see where the system is stopping. Where is the crane idle? Where are groups of people standing around waiting? Where is work not flowing?

That’s not a personality trait. That’s operational excellence.

When you go to the Gemba, you stop debating opinions and start seeing facts. And the people doing the work will tell you what’s broken in the system. They usually want to tell you. The issue isn’t that the field is hiding problems; the issue is that leadership isn’t close enough to see them and humble enough to ask.

Find the Constraint, Fix the Constraint, Restore Flow

Once you can see stoppages, the next move is to find the constraint.

Beanie’s story about a cooling tower rebuild at a power station makes this real. The site wasn’t “a workforce problem.” The site was clean and organized. The workforce was capable. The issue was that decisions, materials, design responses, and information weren’t arriving fast enough. The system’s biggest constraint was controlling the speed of everything.

So instead of yelling at crews to go faster, he attacked the constraint. He focused on restoring flow. And the results were dramatic: same people, different process, radically different production.

That’s the point: the system sets the ceiling. Crews can only move as fast as the biggest constraint in the system.

Why Good People “Fail Despite Their Best Efforts”

Jason said something that should hit every leader in the gut: the trades are bending over backwards. They add labor when asked. They rush when asked. They push when pushed. They try hard.

And still the project fails.

Not because they don’t care. Not because they’re not capable. But because they are being asked to execute in chaos. They are being asked to perform without a stable plan, without full kit, without reliable information flow, and without an environment designed for success.

This is where the leadership posture matters. The system failed them; they didn’t fail the system.

Early Warning Signs You’re Starting Too Soon

When you walk the site, these are the signals that planning and readiness are missing:

• Crews waiting in groups for materials, access, answers, or direction
• Equipment sitting idle while labor burns time “staying busy”
• Work fronts opening and closing rapidly because constraints weren’t removed
• Frequent “we don’t have design, so we can’t plan” statements used as a shield
• Leaders adding bodies to the site before the site can support them
• A schedule that exists on paper but is ignored in the field

Those aren’t character flaws. Those are system alarms.

Precon Is Production Too: Plan It Like You Mean It

Here’s the trap: many teams act like preconstruction is “administration” and construction is “production.”

That’s backwards.

Preconstruction is the first production system. If you want flow in the field, you must build flow in precon. If you want reliable commitments in the field, you must create reliable decision making upstream. If you want Takt to work, you must create conditions where crews can actually hold the beat.

LeanTakt thinking makes this visible: stability is not created by pushing harder. It’s created by making ready.

Build It Virtually First: Models, Simulation, and “If We Can’t Draw It…”

Jason shared a key line from his experience: “If we can’t draw it, we can’t build it.”

That statement is more than a slogan. It’s a requirement for reliability.

When teams fail to plan, they skip the act of building the project virtually first. They don’t simulate it. They don’t physically visualize it. They don’t walk through it with trade partners. They don’t use models, mockups, or simple physical representations to see the work before it happens.

You can’t “wing” complexity.

If the project is complicated, the team must slow down long enough to design the work. That’s how you eliminate chaos before it hits the field. That’s how you protect safety, quality, and families.

The Trap of Task Switching in Precon

Beanie added another preconstruction killer: task switching.

When precon teams stack too many tasks into a day, they lose massive time to context switching. Work doesn’t finish; it just gets “touched.” People feel busy, but output is low. And when precon output is low, construction readiness is low. Then construction time gets compressed. Then leadership panics. Then planning gets cut. Then the field pays for it.

Precon must be managed like production: clear outputs, focused batches of work, and visible flow.

What “Good” Looks Like: Benchmarking to Excellence, Not Average

One of the most important mindsets in this conversation is the refusal to benchmark against “industry average.”

Industry average is not the target. Excellence is the target.

Jason and Beanie both point to learning from better systems, better planning habits, and better operational models. When you see what “good” looks like, you stop accepting chaos as normal. You stop tolerating planning gaps as “just construction.”

Respect for people is a production strategy. When the plan is stable, the work is safer, the quality is higher, and the stress drops. Flow over busyness.

Daily Learning Loops: ORCA and Not Waiting Until the End to Learn

Most companies wait until the end of the project to do “lessons learned.” Then they shelve them, forget them, and repeat the same mistakes.

Beanie calls out a better way: daily learning loops that improve tomorrow’s plan using what happened today. The point is simple: don’t delay learning until it’s too late to matter.

If you want reliability, you must build feedback into the system while the work is happening.

Precon Fixes That Restore Time and Flow

If your precon process is chewing up construction time, start here:

• Define the output of every major precon task before you start it
• Reduce task stacking so work can finish instead of constantly switching
• Use visual models and simulations to “build it” before you build it
• Align decisions, buyout, and design responses to protect field flow
• Plan the work with trade partners early so constraints surface early
• Treat precon like a production system with flow, not a calendar of meetings

That’s how you stop stealing time from the field.

When you do this work, you are building a system that can actually support people doing the work. And that is the mission, whether you say it directly or not: we’re building people who build things.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

Conclusion

If your project is behind before it starts, the answer is not to push harder. The answer is to plan better, make ready, and restore flow.

Go to the Gemba. Find where the work stops. Fix the constraint. Stop the line when full kit isn’t present. Build it virtually before you build it physically. Treat precon like production. And protect people by designing a system that sets them up to succeed.

Because when planning is missing, the most dedicated crews in the world will still struggle. As Jason put it, “We’re failing despite our best efforts.”

FAQ

What does “failing to plan” look like on a jobsite?
It usually shows up as motion without progress: crews waiting, equipment idle, constant questions, and a schedule that’s ignored because the work isn’t truly ready. People look busy, but flow is broken, and the project starts burning time and money immediately.

Why do projects start before they’re ready?
Upstream time gets burned in decisions, approvals, design churn, and buyout delays. That stolen time compresses construction, and leadership feels pressure to “get it moving,” which often causes teams to abandon planning right when they need it most.

How do I know if the problem is the people or the system?
Start by examining the process: are crews getting materials, answers, access, and workable information when they need it? If not, the system is the constraint. Good people can only perform as well as the environment allows.

What is the fastest way to diagnose what’s really wrong in the field?
Go to the Gemba and look for stoppages in flow: where work is waiting, where equipment isn’t moving, where crews are stacked up. Then ask the people doing the work what’s blocking them. That usually reveals the constraint quickly.

How can preconstruction planning reduce stress and rework during construction?
When precon builds the project virtually, reduces task switching, clarifies outputs, and removes constraints early, construction starts stable. That stability reduces panic, overtime, rework, and safety risk because the work can flow the way it was intended.