This is a review (of sorts) of a book that shall remain Nameless, broken down into all the things it did that you Really Shouldn't Do. Parts one through four are listed here.

Often the climactic scene of a story, movie or TV show involves a Grand Plan to win the day. It's often convoluted, usually strains belief in a few places and is designed to have the reader on edge, wondering just how they're going to pull it off.

There are two main structures to the Grand Plan:

1. A character tells us they have a plan, and we discover what it was as it happens, including the hiccups - or, more cleverly, things that look like hiccups that were planned for all along (think Ocean's Eleven). Usually this involves intricate, complex plans that are a delight to discover in themselves. We read on in order to see how the plan will work, usually trying to decipher which bits are Hiccup, and which bits are Plan.
2. A character tells us the plan in detail and then in the execution, it all goes horribly wrong. Plans using this option are usually simpler, as the drama is in the problems that arises. We read on to see how they're going to salvage it despite the catastrophe.

What you can't do is both at the same time. If your characters tell us what the plan is, then it has to go wrong.Otherwise the reader is left feeling something is missing; a crucial dose of drama has not been delivered, and the ending falls flatter than the 'it was all a dream' travesty.

Furthermore, if you choose option 2, your story must spend a greater amount of time salvaging the plan than it did telling us about it in the first place.  Nameless's crime in this instance was not only to tell me the plan only to have nothing go wrong, but tell me, in great detail (and several times) the things that *could* possibly go wrong, and how terrible they would be. Four whole pages were devoted to describing the plan and building the tension, only to have the crucial moment over in three sentences. No sense of payoff, no satisfaction.