Scenes are discovered, not made

Depending on your personality type, the idea of designing a whole performance plan in your head might be very appealing!  Wouldn't it be fantastic to just sit down at your desk and conceive the whole master plan in your head, write it down, and be done?

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way.  Performance plans that come fully-formed from the head of the director are always lacking, for various reasons.

Firstly, two heads are better than one.  Unless you have special magical powers, adding in a second and third point of view will create a better, more compelling and believable story than you could do by yourself.  Just the process of talking it through with someone will crystallize your own ideas, by forcing you to put them into words.  Talking it through is like a very early version of trying it out for an audience - you'll learn a lot from the reaction you get.  Thinking of it another way, you'll never really know what it's like to communicate your piece until you at least have to communicate your plan!

Ideally you will also involve the rest of the performers, if you're not planning to do it alone.  If you are a musical leader of a large group, don't come to them with a fully formed, inflexible plan.  You might think it will save time, but in practice it just causes problems.  First, they may not buy into the plan if they had nothing to do with its creation.  And you need their buy-in, because without it you'll never get the best out of them.  You might even get sabotage!  People can be... complex.

And even if you work with a bunch of very easy-going performers (is that a contradiction in terms?), you'll spend more time explaining your plan than it would take to develop it jointly.

This does mean that you have to give up on the idea of a plan that is *all yours* but you probably recognize, at some level, that it isn't important.  That's just your ego talking, and you should never let your ego interfere with your goals, like creating the best performances you can.

Most of the time, when I work with a vocal group on a piece, they don't yet have any plan for it.  Not even the basics.  And still, by going through the lyrics and paying attention to the clues that the composer and the arranger have provided, we can usually rough-out a plan in less than a half-hour.  And creating a plan as a group means the group are all going to be on the same page, and better yet they will probably never forget that plan!  In any case their retention will be much better than if they had been given the plan as a fait accompli.