Sense and Respond, Not Predict and Control

Definition

Traditional planning and budgeting assume the future can be forecast accurately enough that a plan, once set, mostly needs execution and control against deviation. Laloux describes an alternative — "sense and respond" — where the organization abandons upfront prediction in favor of continuous, real-time noticing of what's actually happening and adjusting accordingly, treating steering as something done in a constant stream of small corrections rather than once at the start.

In the Book

Brian Robertson of Holacracy supplies the book's central image: managing a company by predict-and-control is like riding a bicycle with your eyes closed, having calculated the steering angle in advance from a committee meeting, then blaming and firing whoever caused the inevitable fall — when the fix is simply to keep your eyes open and adjust continuously. FAVI's Jean-François Zobrist offers a complementary metaphor, urging people to "think like farmers: look 20 years ahead, and plan only for the next day," since a farmer who rigidly followed a plan instead of adjusting to actual weather and soil "would quickly grow hungry." Zobrist also distinguishes complicated systems (a Boeing 747 — many parts, but predictable) from complex systems (a bowl of spaghetti — a few dozen parts, but unpredictable when disturbed), arguing that predictions retain value in the former but lose relevance in the latter. Concretely, the book reports that at Sun Hydraulics, budgets are set only when a forecast is actually needed for a decision, and forecasted numbers become the budget directly — the organization doesn't track variance between forecast and reality because, in the CEO's words, it isn't worth the energy.

Why It Matters

The concept gives a name to a specific trade-off: predict-and-control buys the comfort of an upfront plan at the cost of brittleness when reality departs from the forecast (which, in a genuinely complex system, it reliably will); sense-and-respond trades that comfort for continuous adaptiveness. It reframes control itself — arguing that rigid adherence to a stale plan is only an illusion of control, while constant small corrections in response to live signal is what actually keeps a system on course. This is directly portable to any domain where a system is complex rather than merely complicated: a plan is a hypothesis about the future, and steering should never stop.