FAILING TO PLAN IS PLANNING TO FAIL?

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. Ezra Solomon

The quote 'Failingto Plan is Planning to Fail' has been attributed to Alan Lakein, a 1970s writer of books on 'time management'. Whether or not this attribution is correct, the link of this quote to the concept of 'time management' is typical of management as magic. Since when could anyone manage time; which flows along whether we like it or not? But the management that Lakein, or whoever, is referring to is not applied to the flow of time; it concerns the allocation of managers' decisions and actions to the time available.

 

Consider some typical management questions: How do managers allocate limited financial resources to several competing organizational needs over the next five years? Which potential products should be chosen for future changing markets? How many people, and with what particular skills; should be recruited, employed, and trained for our needs?

      The Zodiac

Questions such as these require managers to know what will be the competing organizational needs, potential products, changing markets, needed people skills,or whatever; in the future. And that is the point where Mangement as Magic stresses the unquestioned need for forecasting as a basis for planning for what will happen, and therefore, what to do, in the face of a future over which they have limited control. Not surprisingly, the complexity and uncertainties of the real world mean that there is no management magic that can produce clear and reliable forecasts and, in this real world: 'The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,

Gang aft agley' (The best laid plans of mice and men go often astray. Robert Burns).

Then what should managers do? Should they just give up trying to manage? The answer to these questions is found by not confusing what managers should do with how they should do it. As we saw when considering COMPLEXITY AND HUMAN ACTIONS —>, the best way to deal with complexity and uncertainty is to maximze variety. So instead of trying to produuce a set of precise plans based on assumed high-accuracy forecasts, managers should give up beliefs and values found in the TIME TRANNY which insists that there is a magic formula to be discovered that governs the course of history. This might then lead to a new version of the supposed Lakein quote which would say:

Planning for forecast failure is no failed plan

More symptoms . . .