How the ‘Perfect Plan’ can lead you to Disaster
Today I have a bee in my bonnet, so please look away if my frankness might bother you. In the last couple of days I’ve had yet another conversation with a Local Council planning team manager about Strategic Planning for their Council that bothered me a great deal. What really has me bothered is that the conversation indicated that the reason that this particular Council had not managed to achieve its outcomes was the belief that their previous plans were not perfect. This is NOT the first time a similar suggestion from a Local Council has been offered.
And yet nothing could be further from the truth. The rationale that ‘lack of planning perfection’ could be the cause of inaction is based on the unfounded truism that it is better to do nothing, than to do something poorly. But this ’cause-effect’ approach (non perfection = poor outcome) is not how reality works, because reality shows that NO PLAN IS PERFECT.
Where planning processes often fall down is NOT from the starting position of ‘imperfection’ but from the unfounded belief that once you’ve got things perfect at the start, you can forget to monitor your progress or the need to build in the capacity to adapt and change. And that IS where planning breaks down. The annual, biennial, or triennial planning programs that ignore the need to pay attention to progress are the barriers to achievement – not ‘imperfection’. There is NOT a single Local Council in Australia that does not have the capacity to achieve most of what it wants to achieve.
Plans should, nay MUST highlight the core starting assumptions upon which a strategic decision is made. Indicators of likely progress or non prgress ought to be considered in advance as clues. But can we please stop aiming for the perfect planning outcome. Assumptions; Adaptation; Attention – these are the things that matter greatly in planning your future. If you want to get it right then a ‘Triple A’ approach will take you a very long way indeed. Perfection on the hand, will likely get you no where slowly or by lulling you in to doing nothing, land you at Disaster central quickly.
Old normal, new normal, normal normal. As some businesses aim to rush back to ‘old normal’ they’re likely missing a key opportunity to define, perhaps for the first time, what a new normal should look like for themselves. This Workforce Planning framework should help As a CEO or senior manager, here’s questions I’d want…
Read More >As Covid19 variants continue to emerge, the cause of which can be fairly placed at a lack of social distancing and slow vaccine rates that allow ‘mixing’ of viral strains in social settings, India is on the brink of a healthcare collapse and the implications for Australian companies, especially in the tech sector, are huge.…
Read More >What does the future hold for Australia in the next 3 months, to 3 years? Travel, work, living… Recording to the one hour session inc a Q&A Here’s the Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/pBJqFvN_yZVrktNsN2xWRE7heUTpr226GtyjJpiChG8yZA2D3qEHpACjm8TpMfxd.67Jj1DNSPserOvpZ Passcode: 1DPi*.$Z
Read More >Sometimes the words come to you readily and this small piece has me thinking about what I’d like to say at a time when maybe I’ve lost the cognitive ability to do so Before I was Me Before I was Me I used to be fit, and even quite smart; We’d chat about love,…
Read More >I was doing it well before then and there’s clips of me online going back as far as 2010 or so, railing against the idea of human resources as a label and the insistence by HR managers or CEOs that only people who work ‘in the office’ are going to be productive. It Is A…
Read More >Like lab grown meats, Vertical Farming is going to be part of the future of food. For now it might be best to compare them to small scale battery storage on the electrical grid that can help balance out spikes of demand in the system and provide an output directly where needed. Eventually (like…
Read More >In rental and lease markets it’s fair to say that for the best part of three decades, the landlords have been the price setters. The rules around negative gearing in domestic supply enable sizeable portfolios. Demand in office spaces in central suburbs has been consistently tight. And now, finally, CFO’s have become aware of the…
Read More >With Australia having just about wrestled Covid19 to the ground (NSW remains a bit of an issue) there’s now surging demand for PPE in the USA. The Covid19 virus is tracking toward an exponential increase and PPE Manufacturers should start looking for supply opportunities Sadly in the USA over the past week, they are adding…
Read More >The Mechanical, Psychological, and Biological Interventions of a Pandemic With Johnson and Johnson also pausing it’s #Covid19 #vaccine trial, it is becoming clearer to more of the public, that the long steady path to a vaccine is not something that can be rushed for anyone’s political agenda or preferred view of the world. We’re learning…
Read More >It seems that one way or another, Victoria is going to pop out of #Lockdown. Probably not in the way we would have hoped. And so for everyone pushing for #AfterLockdown in Victoria and for the wider society, there are two questions you must confront: One – ‘What do you feel is an acceptable level…
Read More >