Planning for a future event does not mean that one expects to be able to control the future.
I once worked on a project with a voluntary group and drew up plans for an event to take place in a week or so. Being who I am I tried to carefully articulate what shape and form the event should be and who we wanted to attend. And then I advertised and promoted in various ways to work towards those goals.
In debates about the promotion activities some said to me "You can't control who is going to come", "You can't control the weather so you don't know how many will actually turn up". Or when I try and aim for equal numbers of men and women - "But you can't control that".
"I know" I say "but I can control how I promote it and if we have a desire that there should be equal numbers of men and women we can design our promotion to encourage that. And if we find as we monitor results that it isn't working then we can change how we promote."
It is a truism of course - no one can control anything about the future.
All that we can control, if at all, is our present action.
The comments must have come from a widely held misunderstanding of the planning process.
What is planning then?
1) We decide what we would like to happen at some future date.
2) We work out what we have to do today, and subsequent days, to enable that to happen.
So a plan enables us to direct and use the control which we have of our actions in the present moment (the only thing that we can control, if that!) to give us anticipated consequences. It is not that we know for certain that any result will happen - just that we have agreed that this is the best course of action to get what we want.
Simple enough but some important points have to be noted.
Deciding what we want to happen: this has to be described well enough to enable all participants to share "the vision". Everyone needs enough to be able to think through the consequences of the goal. Consequences is in a sense the wrong word - taking the passage of time into consideration we are really thinking of the pre-conditions, the things that are needed today to make tomorrow have the right shape. Everyone needs to think about what she has to do in her particular role in the organisation to achieve the goal. They cannot do that without the goal being properly described.
It is a big mistake to think that because the goal is well articulated that this in some sense mandates that it should happen.
Having the the time and the skills to develop the vision of the goal and the ability to communicate by painting the picture with enthusiasm is an essential role for the planner and leader. Just because the picture is painted well does not mean that the painter has any kind of erroneous belief that he is somehow fixing the future. No, he does it to cause people to take action today, the right action, that will, all going to plan, lead everyone to the goal.
And that leads on to the worse mistake that I have experienced.
An enthusiastic picture and plan does not mean that the painter has a vested interest in the particular goal so fulsomly described: just as a portrait painter tries to find the character of the sitter and depict it faithfully without becoming emotionally attached to the sitter so a planner does his best to portray the goal and to develop from that all the necessary steps needed to deliver it. The emotional attachment a planner has, if anything is to the completeness of the process - "you want to be there on Day 4 starting from here so you have to do this on day 1, this on day2 and that on day 3." His job satisfaction comes from making sure there are no loose ends and everyone is singing from the same sheet.
So the description of the goal is an attempt to give enough detail so that present activities can be ordered and arranged to achieve that future goal. It may even be that having described the goal and worked out the pre-conditions, who has to do what and when, it is not practical. So the goal has to be changed or further pre-conditions listed to overcome the hurdles.
Of course, the effect of something we do today cannot necessarily be fully predicted. Some things are very reliable, others not so. If I pay a shopkeeper £5 to display an advert, for certain my project funds reduce by £5. What is less certain, much less in this case, is how much of a response the advert will get.
And of course, if I spend ten hours today working on a plan to achieve some worthwhile goal those ten hours are very well spent - even though I have not an iota of control of any aspect of the future.
