I've been trying to work out for a while why good plans so often get quietly overtaken by the quarter they were written for.

Not wrong, exactly. Overtaken.

Because the planning itself is usually fine. Careful, thorough, a lot of good thinking in it.

It's just that most plans I've seen are built for one future, in enormous and loving detail. And then a different one turns up.

I do this myself, by the way, more often than I'd like to admit. One version of next month, planned beautifully. Then next month arrives wearing a different hat.

So the question this training is built around is a small one, really.

How many futures were you ready for?

How it works: play, then the EPPA loop

The programme runs on one loop, and I call it EPPA. Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application.

The Experience is the game: Chaos in the Kitchen, played in person, with something real on the line.

Then we unpack it. Patterns first - the plan nobody reopened, the deal made too late, the call judged on the scoreboard.

Then Principles, in the room's own words. Be ready for more than one future. Judge the decision separately from the result. I don't lecture those in. They land because the room got there.

And then Application, which is the bit that usually gets cut when the clock runs out. It's also the only bit that changes next quarter.

So that is where the AI goes. Only there.

There's no AI in the kitchen. The laptops only come out at Application, on the leaders' own real plans.

The game at the heart of it: Chaos in the Kitchen

You are running a professional kitchen. Bookings are in. Ratings have to hold. Revenue has to keep moving.

And you can see the trouble from here. The weekend rush. That supplier who has form. The one team member who is having a month.

You know all of it is coming. You have no idea what shape it arrives in.

Teams run the kitchen as a business, with ratings on one side, revenue on the other, and a service coming that nobody can see clearly.

Staff are short. Supplies are short. Time is very short. Demand keeps moving.

So every round they triage, they trade something away to get something else, and they find out whether they were making a judgment or just reacting quickly with confidence.

Deals can be cut with other kitchens. Alliances form.

Then conditions move. Sometimes a nudge. Sometimes a proper gut-punch. And the game stops being about the plan and starts being about whether anyone is willing to reopen it.

It's designed so that teams who made reversible calls early keep breathing, and rigid ones have a very interesting second half.

The future in this game is uncertain, but it isn't unknowable. Not if somebody in the room is actually thinking about it.

What the kitchen is built to bring out

Make the future genuinely unclear and people stop describing how they plan. They just plan. Here is what the game is designed to put on the table:

Who hedges, and who bets the whole night on one outcome, and then discovers there was never a plan B, only a strong feeling.
Who buys options early, and who locks something in round one that has turned into a liability by round three.
Why the best-planned kitchen can run out of clock. A gorgeous strategy with no time left to run it, set against the rough plan that moved early.
Who negotiates while calm and holding something, and who goes looking for a deal at the exact moment everybody can smell that they need one.
Whether a reversal gets decided out loud or just drifted into, and whether the room listens to the person who says "we should reverse this" or defends the original call because it was theirs.
Who can tell a bad decision from a bad result. A sound call still loses sometimes. A reckless one still wins sometimes. The interesting bit is who judges a colleague purely on the scoreboard.

The tell it's built around is a simple one. Does somebody say out loud "this has changed, let's decide again", or does the room quietly keep running a plan that stopped matching reality ten minutes ago?

Where AI comes in: the Application step

By the time we reach Application, the room has already named its own patterns and its own principles. Nobody needed a machine for that, and I'd honestly rather they didn't have one.

Then each leader turns to their real work. Here is what that looks like:

Bring one real plan. Each leader brings one actual plan for next quarter. Their own, and the more real the better.
Ask AI for three other futures. AI drafts three futures they hadn't planned for, and the early signal that would tell them each one is arriving. It's the Lotus Blossom idea, more or less: many options on the table before you pick one.
Mark what can be undone. The leader goes through their own plan and marks which calls are reversible and which aren't.
Buy one option now, and set a date to decide again. A named behaviour, a real situation, a date. All three, or it didn't happen.

Imagine a leadership team walking into their next planning meeting with four futures on the table instead of one, and a date already agreed for when they'll look again.

What stays human

AI is quite good at writing other futures. It can't tell a bad decision from a bad result.

That one stays with the leader, and honestly, I think it's the most useful thing they'll practise all day.

Come and have a look at the calendar

What your leaders walk out with

Their own plan, with three other futures written next to it, and the early signal for each.
A marked-up plan showing which calls can be undone and which can't, which can quietly change which ones get made first.
One option bought now, while it's still cheap, rather than when everybody can see they need it.
A date to decide again, already in the diary, so "let's revisit this" stops being a polite way of never revisiting it.
A shared way of talking about a poor result that came from a good call, without anybody having to defend themselves first.

A little about the person running it

I've been training founders and leaders since 2019. The founders have been in the US, Canada, Australia, Singapore and India.

I don't have a score for this programme to show you, and I'd rather not borrow one from another programme and let you assume it.

What I can do is talk you through the kitchen and the Application step on a call, properly, and you can judge it for yourself.

Who it fits

Senior leaders and strategy teams. The people whose calls cost real money and land two quarters later.
Teams in the middle of something changing, where the job is staying ready for four plans rather than executing one. A volatile market, a fast-growth stretch, a restructure.
Leadership teams whose post-mortems keep arriving at the same sentence. "We planned for X, Y happened, and we carried on doing X."
Strategy offsites, on the morning of day one, or just before a real planning session, so the habits are visible and named while there's still time to change them.

Who would get more from something else

Operational and frontline teams. This is built for people allocating resources, and it probably won't land the same way with roles built around execution. Another programme on the programmes page would serve them better.
Groups with nothing real to trade off. The whole engine needs something to spend.
When the actual problem is execution quality rather than strategic judgment. Different game, sometimes not a game at all, and I'll say which.

Fair questions

"Our leaders already plan well."

That's fair, and they very likely do. This is more about how many futures the plan was built for, which is a slightly different muscle.

"A game is a lot of leadership time."

It is, and I won't pretend otherwise. What I'd say is that the AI step then runs on the plan they were going to have to revisit anyway, so a good part of the time comes back as work they needed to do regardless. We size the session around your group, and I'll tell you on the call what I think it needs.

"Can AI really help with strategy?"

With the judgment, no, and the programme doesn't ask it to. With writing three futures you hadn't thought of, and the signal for each, it's genuinely quite useful. The leader still decides what to do about them.

"Will it work with the tools we're allowed?"

It should. I build the Application step around whichever tool your leaders are actually allowed to use, and around your real policy limits, including what's off the table.

Worst case? We have a conversation and you come out of it with a clearer brief.

Come and see if it fits

Tell me about your leaders and the kind of uncertainty sitting in front of them, and I'll tell you straight whether this is the right programme. I'd rather lose the booking than run the wrong day.

Come and have a look at the calendar

Tell me what you're trying to fix

I went back and forth on whether to put a form at the end of this page.

Because a form asks you to be tidy about something you are probably still working out. And the enquiries I enjoy most tend to arrive as three messy lines, written by someone who has not finished deciding what they want yet.

So there are two ways in, and I genuinely do not mind which one you use.

Write to me directly at arvindh@puttheplayerfirst.com and say roughly what you want to change. Three lines is plenty. I read my own email.

Or fill this in, if that is easier. It lands in the same inbox.

I answer these myself, usually within a day. Two if I am in a room somewhere with my phone in a bag.

And you are not committing to anything by writing in. Worst case we have a conversation, and you come out of it with a clearer brief than you had this morning.

The kitchen won't make anybody better at predicting the future. Nothing really does. It might make them a little more ready for the one that turns up.

With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.

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