Every business should have a plan. It doesn’t matter if it’s a store that specializes in selling second-hand furniture to people with San Francisco apartments or a sculptor that makes chrome poodles for elderly rich women with more money than sense. At some point, there’s got to be a plan in mind that gives the enterprise its direction, its goal. Without one, it’d be like someone playing a game being aware of the win condition and not bothering to work towards that goal. However, while the importance of the goal can never be stressed enough, there is still the problem of figuring out which plans are worth following through on and which ones happen to be terrible ideas.

One of the best ways is to see if the plan is any good is to consider what it depends on. Every plan has what can be called “dependencies.” These are the responses, behaviors, or other details that it hinges on. If any of these break down or don’t occur, there is a good chance that the plan isn’t going to fly any time soon. Look at every detail of the plan and figure out which parts of it are dependent on a variable that the business cannot control or reasonably predict. If most of the plan hinges on dependencies that are too unpredictable or beyond the entrepreneur’s ability to influence, then there’s a good chance it will fall apart once exposed to real life conditions. Best drop it before it becomes too problematic.

Another qualifier that can be used to eliminate a bad plan is the amount of detail in it. A detailed plan can be useful because it gives clear-cut instructions and procedures for how certain things are to be done. However, too much detail can also cripple a plan once exposed to the reality of business. The more detailed plans are, the more they tend to interconnect everything. In theory, this works well because it defines everything. The sad part is that this is rarely how things play out. Interconnecting everything too much causes problems should any part of the plan be impossible to follow through on. Too much detail means that the plan doesn’t allow any flexibility.

A plan that has no room for contingencies is bad. No plan manages to survive contact with real world conditions intact, such that there must always be concessions made for handling the unexpected. A plan that doesn’t have any room for errors and isn’t built such that any given step can be “replaced” by something else if necessary is going to be more of a hindrance than anything else.

Additionally, in all seriousness, if a five-year old kid can point out a problem in a plan in one glance, then one should consider going back to the drawing board.