Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason
Source: https://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/site/157586192X.shtml ↗
Bratman's philosophical treatise on the nature of intention — what it means to intend something, how intentions relate to plans, and how rational agents navigate the gap between what they decide to do and what they actually do.
The book is demanding academic philosophy, not a business book.
For product direction the value is indirect but real: product work is in large part the management of intentions — your own, your team's, the organisation's — and Bratman's careful analysis provides vocabulary for a domain most practitioners navigate intuitively.
Read for the specific distinctions between intention, desire, and plan; they clarify some conversations that otherwise muddle.
Not for everyone; essential for some.
Central argument
Bratman argues that intentions are not reducible to desires plus beliefs, as standard Humean accounts hold, but are a distinct mental state with their own functional role in rational agency. Intentions are partial plans: they commit the agent to future action, constrain further practical reasoning by settling what is not up for reconsideration, and coordinate behavior across time and with other agents. The central thesis is that this planning structure — not moment-to-moment desire-satisfaction — is what makes extended, rational action possible for beings like us.
Critique
Bratman's framework assumes a relatively unified, coherent rational agent whose intentions can in principle be made consistent and whose plans persist with some stability. This sits awkwardly against evidence from psychology and organizational behavior showing that intentions are routinely fragmented, tacit, or held by collectives in ways that resist the logical tidiness his model requires. The theory is most illuminating precisely where practice is most idealized, which limits its direct application to the messy, distributed, politically-charged intention-formation that actually characterizes organizations.
Why it matters for product
The distinction Bratman draws between an intention and a desire is directly useful for product leaders diagnosing why roadmaps fail to produce coherent outcomes: teams often treat strategic priorities as desires — things to move toward when convenient — rather than as intentions that constrain and filter subsequent decisions. His account of plans as commitment devices that reduce the cost of future deliberation also reframes how a CPO should think about strategy documents and OKRs: their value is not informational but agential, settling questions that would otherwise be re-litigated in every sprint or quarterly review.