"We're building the plane while we're flying it" is a governance failure
“We’re building the plane while we’re flying it,” is a phrase I’ve heard in many meetings while teams deliberated what needed to be done, how it needed to be done, and who would be accountable for it. Although the phrase is often used to describe operational work in major initiatives that organizations undertake for the first time, it actually describes the lack of a strong strategic foundation.
When someone says this, the organization is defining the project scope, goals, and priorities long after execution has begun. The executive starts doing operational work as the team realizes it doesn’t have the authority to make certain decisions. The person leading the initiative underneath the executive ends up revisiting or reverse-engineering the institutional purpose of the initiative. All of the decisions that must be made are made in haste, leading to strategic drift and raising the risk of project failure. And the unforgiving timing of election cycles only amplifies this risk.
“Building the plane while flying it” is a diagnosis of research governance failure. The solution is not to create more processes specifically for the initiative. Process does not govern anything—process does not define what decisions must be made under what circumstances, how they will be made, and who will own them. Process only reflects governance established beforehand. Without strong research governance, the research process either adds more confusion to decision-making or becomes an unnecessary constraint.
Major initiatives that lack research governance create financial, reputational, and strategic risks to the movement. Expensive initiatives create financial risks, resulting in cash flow issues and the inability to meet the project scope. Highly visible initiatives create reputational risk, resulting in damaged relationships with peers or funders who had specific expectations from the initiative. And these risks heighten the potential for the research to fail by either being misaligned with the needs of the movement or simply delivered too late for organizations to use it in a given election cycle.
When research governance is established before execution, the organization is intentional about anticipating risks at each stage of the project. Decision rules for different risk scenarios, and the people who will own those decisions, are defined before the pressure of project delivery ramps up. The initiative’s purpose is explicitly tied to institutional priorities, and key outcomes are defined as guidelines that structure decision-making and risk-taking. The initiative has a stronger strategic foundation to set the research up for success. Governance established before execution enables the executive to retain authority over research direction rather than execution. Research governance is a leadership function that is established before execution scales.