This is a work in progress; its motif follows. Completion expected in 1999.
Planning is an everyday human activity, a basic survival skill. Planning is also a central feature of management and an arena of professional practice. Individuals, groups, organizations, communities, even nations, plan. They prepare courses of action that address needs, problems and potentialities to achieve desired outcomes that will make a difference and generate learning.
To be effective, planning must be congruent with its context - increasingly complex, uncertain and fast-changing, even chaotic - and it must engage planners fully, not just in narrowly defined professional/managerial roles. The prevalent form of planning, deeply ingrained in Western society’s institutions and individual members, does not respond adequately to these imperatives.
Typically, planning is prescribed, approached and in retrospect presented as a deliberate process. Thought and intent are to precede action; planners establish ends and then devise means to achieve them. Such an approach works best when goals are reasonably clear and reliable prediction is possible. In the absence of full information, well-defined purpose and assured predictability, however, it’s often necessary to act on a situation in order to learn more about it; intent is then discovered through action. In practice, the deliberate approach tends to dominate, which may then lead to mismatches between planning processes and their contexts. Such planning is not necessarily wrong, just incomplete. Effective plans and strategies mix deliberate and emergent, combining closure and control with openness to the environment and learning.
Similarly, planners and the processes they create tend to exclude or underplay the arational - subjectivity, moral and value judgements, feelings, instinct, intuition, non-traditional forms of meaning-making and knowledge - in favour of logic, impersonal “hard” data and objective technical analysis. Again, this approach is overly limiting and often ill-suited to situations featuring diversity and conflict, concern for human impacts of change, and the need for optimum vision and creativity.
A pathway to more holistic and effective planning incorporates these missing dimensions, as situationally appropriate. It means bringing the whole self to work. Above all, it means re-imagining planning.