Proactive Doer: Acting Before the Plan Is Perfect

The proactive doer style prefers to act as soon as possible: it takes the initiative quickly and learns by doing, rather than over-planning.

“Proactive doer” is the name our entrepreneurial style quiz gives this profile. It isn’t a clinical category or an official type: it describes a preference. Behind it lie two real lines of research that are best kept apart.

Two kinds of proactivity: the company’s and the person’s

The first is entrepreneurial orientation, a concept that measures companies, not people. Danny Miller (1983) defined the entrepreneurial firm as one that innovates, takes risks and moves before its competitors. Jeffrey Covin and Dennis Slevin (1989) turned those three dimensions (innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking) into a scale, and Lumpkin and Dess (1996) added two more: autonomy and competitive aggressiveness.

For these authors, a proactive company is one that anticipates future demand instead of reacting to what others do. A meta-analysis by Rauch, Wiklund, Lumpkin and Frese (2009), covering 51 studies and more than 14,000 firms, found a correlation of 0.24 between entrepreneurial orientation and performance: moderate and fairly stable across countries.

The second line does measure the person. Thomas Bateman and Michael Crant (1993) proposed the proactive personality: a relatively stable tendency to change one’s environment rather than simply adapt to it. In their original study, scores on the scale were related to need for achievement, to the kind of personal achievements participants described, and to being nominated as leaders by their peers.

The quiz’s proactive doer is much closer to this second idea: someone who, faced with an opportunity, prefers to make a move.

What we know about proactive personality

The meta-analysis by Bryan Fuller and Laura Marler (2009) pooled 313 correlations from 107 studies. Proactive personality was associated with career success, both objective and subjective (satisfaction with one’s own career), and also with job performance.

Two nuances matter for reading the result correctly:

• It isn’t the same as the Big Five traits. Bateman and Crant compared their scale with the five major traits and presented it as a disposition in its own right: the initiative to change one’s circumstances.
• It isn’t impulsiveness. A proactive person acts early, but with intent. An impulsive person acts without anticipating consequences. This site’s quiz doesn’t measure the latter.

Day to day

• Faced with a new project, they’d rather get a first version out in a week and fix it based on what they see than spend a month perfecting the plan.
• They spot opportunities and act on them quickly, before others do.
• They learn by adjusting on the go more than by anticipating every possible scenario.
• They tolerate well the margin of error that comes with moving fast.

A familiar example: someone who wants to start a small catering service doesn’t commission a market study. They cook for three events for people they know, note which dishes run out first and how long each one takes, and use that data to set their first prices. In three weekends they’ve learned what a plan would only have given them as an assumption.

Plan or dive in: what the data say

Whether it’s better to plan a lot or launch early is a question with research behind it. Brinckmann, Grichnik and Kapsa (2010) ran a meta-analysis on the link between planning and performance in small firms. Planning helped overall, but its effect depended on context, above all on how new the firm was and on the cultural setting. The authors concluded by proposing to combine planning and learning, at the same time and flexibly.

It’s a comfortable conclusion for the proactive doer: their way of learning by doing isn’t at odds with the evidence, as long as there’s some moment when the lessons get gathered up.

The blind spot of speed

Speed of execution is a real advantage, but without any moment of review it can lead to repeating the same mistakes for never stopping to analyze them.

One tool that suits this profile, because it’s brief, is the premortem described by psychologist Gary Klein (2007): before starting, the team imagines the project has already failed and writes down why. Klein bases it on research into “prospective hindsight” by Mitchell, Russo and Pennington (1989), and presents the exercise as a way to surface doubts nobody dares to raise once the project is underway.

Executing under uncertainty: the Nike story

Phil Knight recounts in his memoir Shoe Dog (2016) how the company that would become Nike grew for years with very little financial margin: it imported Japanese sneakers on bank loans stretched to the limit, constantly renegotiated with suppliers and banks, and made decisions without all the information he would have liked to have.

It’s an autobiographical account, not a study, and it carries the bias of someone telling a story that turned out well. Even so, it illustrates what separates this profile from impulsiveness: Knight acted fast, but he adjusted course based on what he was learning, instead of waiting for a certainty the business was never going to give him.

Our reading: early action doesn’t replace learning, it speeds it up.

This article describes a personality trait, not business advice: for decisions involving real money, the judgment of a qualified professional is still necessary.

Complementary to other styles

This style pairs very well with the innovator, who supplies the ideas the proactive doer turns into real action. The cautious strategist offers the planning counterweight that can spare it avoidable stumbles.

Want to see your own style? Take the entrepreneurial style quiz.

Sources

• Bateman, T. S. and Crant, J. M. (1993). The proactive component of organizational behavior: A measure and correlates. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 14(2), 103-118. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030140202
• Brinckmann, J., Grichnik, D. and Kapsa, D. (2010). Should entrepreneurs plan or just storm the castle? A meta-analysis on contextual factors impacting the business planning-performance relationship in small firms. Journal of Business Venturing, 25(1), 24-40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2008.10.007
• Covin, J. G. and Slevin, D. P. (1989). Strategic management of small firms in hostile and benign environments. Strategic Management Journal, 10(1), 75-87.
• Fuller, B. and Marler, L. E. (2009). Change driven by nature: A meta-analytic review of the proactive personality literature. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 75(3), 329-345. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2009.05.008
• Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18-19.
• Knight, P. (2016). Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike. Scribner.
• Lumpkin, G. T. and Dess, G. G. (1996). Clarifying the entrepreneurial orientation construct and linking it to performance. Academy of Management Review, 21(1), 135-172. https://doi.org/10.2307/258632
• Miller, D. (1983). The correlates of entrepreneurship in three types of firms. Management Science, 29(7), 770-791. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.29.7.770
• Mitchell, D. J., Russo, J. E. and Pennington, N. (1989). Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2(1), 25-38. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.3960020103
• Rauch, A., Wiklund, J., Lumpkin, G. T. and Frese, M. (2009). Entrepreneurial orientation and business performance: An assessment of past research and suggestions for the future. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 33(3), 761-787. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6520.2009.00308.x