This is not meant to sound like ‘ What they didn’t teach you at Harvard Business School “. Though, worth understanding.
When Neil Armstrong planted that flag on the moon in 1969, the world saw one giant leap. What they didn’t see? The 382,000 people who had already failed on paper. NASA didn’t just plan the moon landing. They planned the planning. Then they planned what to plan before planning the planning.
Confused? Good. Let’s travel this journey together.
So, here’s the formula which is…not a formula. No seven steps to..no reframing..no pyramids..lets respect each others’ intelligence. Thats the least we can do.
Because the plan before the plan before the plan isn’t a system—it’s a shift in temporal architecture. It’s learning to see your current actions not as endpoints but as setup sequences. It’s understanding that what you’re doing today isn’t the plot—it’s setting up the character development for a scene that won’t happen until 2027.
Throwback time here:-
Starbucks’ real innovation wasn’t coffee. It was convincing landlords in the 1990s to give them corner locations with window space, even when they had no track record. The plan before the plan was real estate strategy disguised as a coffee business.
WhatsApp’s genius wasn’t the app. Before they wrote a single line of code, Jan Koum and Brian Acton spent years at Yahoo watching what NOT to do with messaging. Their plan before the plan was professional failure that became market intelligence.
Spotify didn’t plan to compete with iTunes. Their plan before the plan was securing music licensing deals nobody thought possible by framing themselves as piracy-killers to the music industry, not iTunes-killers. They changed the opponent before the game began.
The legendary Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi once arrived at his most famous duel… without his sword.
His opponent, Sasaki Kojiro, was already there, blade gleaming, confidence radiating. Musashi showed up late. Casually whittled a wooden sword from an oar on the boat ride over. And won.
But here’s what the history books misses the wood for the trees(or oar?): Musashi’s plan wasn’t “fight with wooden sword.” His plan before the plan was “arrive late enough to agitate Kojiro.” The plan before THAT plan was choosing the island location where he’d have access to an oar. The plan before THAT was building a reputation unpredictable enough that showing up swordless would destabilize rather than disqualify him.
Most people prepare for battle. Legends prepare the battlefield.
In the Kerala backwaters, there’s a 73-year-old boatman named Krishnan who has never, not once in forty years, had an empty boat. Zero marketing. No website. Not even a painted sign.
His secret?
Twenty years ago, he started learning the names of children in tourist families. Not the parents—the children. He’d remember them year after year. “Is Sophia still playing violin?” “Did Rahul get into that engineering college?”
His plan before the plan before the plan wasn’t customer service. It was manufactured nostalgia. He was planting memory trees whose shade he’d enjoy decades later.
Now parents plan their Kerala trips around Krishnan’s availability because their kids—now adults—insist on it.
Most of us end up seeing the outcomes. That said, it is worth probing into the invisible architecture of everything.
You see a bakery. Fresh croissants. The aroma of butter and possibility. You think the plan was: make delicious bread, sell delicious bread.
Wrong.
The REAL plan—the one nobody sees—started three years earlier when the baker stood in a Paris alley at 4 AM, not learning to bake, but learning which flour supplier delivered before dawn. The plan before the plan before the plan was discovering that the city’s water pH affected yeast behavior. It was befriending the landlord’s mother so he’d hold the property for six extra weeks while permits came through.
This is what I call Pre-Strategic Positioning—the invisible scaffolding that makes “overnight success” possible after a decade of darkness.
Some people plan their work. Some work their plan. And then there are those who plan the plan before the plan before the plan — the rare breed who see the invisible scaffolding that holds strategy, serendipity, and soul together.
The first plan is what you scribble on a napkin. The second is what you polish for the PowerPoint. The third — the one before both — lives in your instinct, your madness, your hunger to make a dent before the world even knows a dent is needed.
Some food for torque here if you may:
When Steve Jobs was meditating in India, barefoot and unbothered, that was the plan before the plan before the plan. The ashram before the Apple Store. The real estate of the mind entrenched well before retail real estate.
Before the Wright brothers built their flying machine, they spent years watching birds over sand dunes. That was the pre-flight manual before the flight manual.
Closer home, before Ratan Tata dreamt of the Nano, there was a soaked-in-a-rainy-street moment — him watching a family of four balance precariously on a scooter. That was the human empathy before the corporate blueprint.
Your timeline is not your lifeline. If your plan begins in Excel, it’s probably already dead.
If it begins in emotion, curiosity, or chaos — you’re in business.
The Plan before the Plan before the Plan is the space between intent and invention. The boardroom that exists only in the mind. The audacity to say, “Let’s first feel before we figure.”
So before you do your next quarterly forecast, your next rebrand, your next pitch, ask yourself:
What are you not yet seeing that’s quietly forming? What’s the story before the story?
That’s your real starting line. Everything after that — the slides, the slogans, the success — is just the sequel.
The biggest myth in boardrooms and bedrooms alike? That success begins with the plan. Wrong. Success begins three floors below, in the subterranean basement of thought—the plan before the plan before the plan. That invisible architecture no one ever applauds but everyone benefits from. The scaffolding beneath the blueprint. The warm-up before the overture. The rehearsal before the rehearsal.
Da Vinci’s notebooks weren’t sketches for paintings alone. They were pre-sketches of sketches—miniature rehearsals of imagination. That’s why the Mona Lisa doesn’t just smile, she smirks—because behind her lies not a plan, but the plan before the plan before the plan.
Most strategy decks are choreographed to death. Logos, numbers, charts. But the companies that stand apart invest not in plans, but in the pre-plans. Apple’s “Think Different” wasn’t just advertising—it was pre-thinking. The ideation before innovation before execution.
Contrast that with Kodak. Their plan was solid: keep selling film. Their plan before that? Fuzzy. Their plan before that before that? Nonexistent. And so, they got trapped in their own Polaroid frame.
That Michelin star dish? The chef doesn’t begin at the stove. She begins at the market. Correction: she begins at the farm. That TED talk you admired? The rehearsals didn’t begin at the mirror. They began at the “What am I really trying to say?” question. That viral reel? It wasn’t about trending sounds. It was about micro-observations the creator made months earlier, parked quietly in their Notes app.
So what would the takeaways be here:-
Plans are public. Pre-plans are private. The unseen layers make the seen sparkle. Reverse engineer backwards. Don’t just ask “what’s the plan?” Ask, “what’s the plan before I even knew I needed a plan? Slow is strategic. Think of the un-hurried intention as the ultimate productivity hack. Greatness is fractal. Like Russian dolls, inside every plan lies a smaller one, quieter, truer.
The best strategies don’t begin with slides. They begin with silence. Execution is celebrated. Pre-execution is underrated. But that’s where the real game lives. So, forget Plan A, B, C. Ask instead: What was the prelude?