norman's website
  • Home
  • Blogs
    • Scraps of life blog
    • Creative Academic >
      • BYOD4L BLOG
    • Garden Notes
  • Books
  • Change
  • Creativity
  • Professional services
  • Contact me
  • NTU
  • creativejam
  • CRC
  • GMIT
  • BNU STUDY VISIT
  • AIT
  • portsmouth
  • DIT
  • TLC
  • BERA
  • ICOLACE4
  • PDP
  • OUC
  • MMUni
  • Derby
  • dmucreatives
  • Chester
  • Brighton
  • Buckinghamshire
  • Hallam
  • St Marys
  • LIMERICK
  • kingston
  • UWL
  • SEDA
  • MACAO
  • Beijing
  • IFIUT
  • CRA seminar
  • FBSEworkshop
  • birmingham
  • Creativity in Higher Education
  • graduatestandardsprogramme
  • MAKING MEANING
  • Untitled
  • Blogs
  • SURVEY

Planning in Development - first job of the New Year

4/1/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
With Christmas over our thoughts turned to the big things we wanted to achieve this year. The outside of the house needs painting and my wife wants a new kitchen so both featured in our discussion. Our youngest will complete her GCSE's and she reasoned that for all her hard work she deserved an extra special holiday - going to Australia to see family she hadn't seen for 8 years. I would also like to go as my father is 90 this year. Another daughter at university was explaining her strategy for getting work experience and employment in the summer while our son clearly wanted to keep his options open and not be tied down too much. Then there was a family wedding to factor in and leave to be organised.  All these things came into the conversation and all vied for a share of our time and resources. We were in fact creating a plan for the family: a plan that required us to use our imaginations and ideas, that required us to appreciate each other's perspectives. It also required us to  analyse ideas in order to understand their consequences and the resources they would need. There was negotiation when there were conflicts of interest and persuasion to justify one possible course of action over another.

The process of planning was not dissimilar to any business planning exercise I have been involved in. From this simple situation we can deduce that planning is an important process to help us achieve goals that have to be accomplished by a group of people in more or less the same time framework with a certain set of resources. We can see that it is an emergent and iterative process through which ideas are proposed, shared, evaluated, refined or rejected with the people who need to be involved. I also noticed that the planning process 'degenerated into actually doing stuff'. For example when we discussed the possibility of going to Australia my wife had to check out when she could take leave and I got involved in looking at possible flights and routes.

Picture
Turning to 'work', my immediate task at the start of this new year was to pick up all the different bits and pieces relating to our 'Learning Lives' conference in March. The process itself is part developmental - in the sense of creating opportunities, building new relationships, communicating and selling the ideas, guiding presenters and contributors, and making sure everything connects and fits together. And partly practical delivery - updating websites, administration, reviewing and editing contributions for the e-book etc. But ultimately lots and lots of things have to come together by March 26 and perform on the day and that requires planning. So I spent the best part of two days working through in a partly random partly systematic way all the things I and the team has to do. Again planning morphed into doing. For example, having decided I needed to send a gentle reminder to all contributors of the e-book - I crafted a personalised email and sent it to the main authors. Through this process a solution to a problem emerged: the problem that we could only offer a small number of speakers the opportunity to speak at the conference might be addressed by creating podcasts for all the speakers to accompany their e-book chapters. New ideas definitely emerge through the planning process.

When I worked for an organisation I used to make detailed and explicit plans to make myself and my team accountable to managers and project boards - in fact I still do this for Lifewide Education at the scale of an annual plan with some broad goals and targets. But at the nitty gritty scale, 'working plans' tend to be broad headings that act as a prompt for doing stuff and the what it is that is done generally emerges in the act of doing. So planning and doing at the level at which it really matters are intimate partners.

So why do we plan? I guess we can all think of many reasons. It's about trying to see into the future and appreciate how you might influence aspects of the future by doing things that will help you progress towards that future. In this sense planning holds the visions of your purposes and what you want to achieve in your life and when it is a collaborative thing it serves the social purpose of creating a shared vision of what you want to achieve together. 

Picture
Planning  requires both the creative imagination and the more analytical functions of our brain. It  encourages us to imagine what might be and how the 'what' might be achieved. To draw from the past and project into the future. It encourages us to create designs for processes, relationship building or new physical or virtual things. It also provides a prompt for the evaluation of ideas and potential actions. In doing so we can imagine the consequences of actions, the resources we need, the risks we may need to take and things to avoid. Creating a plan might leave us more or less confident in what we intend to do but these feelings are based on a deeper understanding rather than ignorance. Two much planning can demotivate us as the full implications are revealed - that is why I like to work with the big themes eg 'I need to write a weekly blog,' and work out the detail as I go believing that I will never embark on a course of action if I really know what is going to be involved. Above all, in the social world of work, plans provide me with a road map to give me a sense of direction but I am happy to redraw the map along the way knowing that the execution of a plan is much more about improvisation as situations are encountered and the opportunities and risks within them are understood. This is where my creativity lies in the planning aspects of development.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Purpose

    To develop my understandings of how I learn and develop through all parts of my life by recording and reflecting on my own life as it happens.
    @lifewider1
    @lifewider
    @academiccreator

    I have a rough plan but most of what I do emerges from the circumstances of my life 
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    View my profile on LinkedIn

    Archive

    December 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012

    Categories
    these are the tags I've used 

    All
    5C's Of Social Media
    Achieving
    Applying Learning
    Appreciation
    Attention To Detail
    Awareness
    Band
    Beautiful Day
    Being Influenced
    Being Influenced
    Beliefs
    Bonding
    Book
    Bucket List
    Caring
    Climate For Change
    Cocreation
    Co Creativity
    Co-creativity
    Collaboration
    Collective
    Commitment
    Communication
    Compassion
    Conceptualising
    Conference
    Conflict
    Connected
    Connected Learning
    Connections
    Constructionism
    Creativity
    Creativity In Development
    Creativity Nurturing
    Crowdsourcing
    Cultural Exchange
    Culture
    Curriculum
    Dealing With Emotion
    Dealing With Emotions
    Dealing With Setbacks
    Dealing With Situations
    Designing
    Development
    Disruption
    Disruption In Life
    Ecology
    Emergence
    Emergent Need
    Emergent Opportunity
    Emotion
    Emotion (negative)
    Emotion (positive)
    Empathy
    Engagement
    Enthusing Others
    Environment
    Experience
    Experimenting
    Facilitation
    Failure
    Families
    Family
    Feedback
    Fulfilling Our Purposes
    Goals
    Good Ideas
    Great Idea
    Growing Up
    Guilt
    Health And Fitness
    Histrory
    Ideas
    Identity
    Illness
    Inflections In Life
    Influences
    Influencing
    Information Flow
    Insights
    Inspiration
    Interest
    Intergenerational Learning
    Joy
    Juggling
    Knoweldge And Understanding
    Knowledge
    Knowledge And Understanding
    Knowledge Development
    Knowledge Working
    Leadership
    Learning
    Learning Ecologies
    Learning Ecologies
    Learning Ecology
    Learning For Teaching
    Learning Through Experience
    Learning To Cope
    Learningtoday
    Liberation
    Lifedeep
    Lifewide
    Lifewide Learning
    Lifwide Education
    Liminal Space
    Looking Back
    Love
    Making A Difference
    Making Progress
    Making Progress
    Making Something
    Managing Self
    Men's Sheds
    Models
    Motivating Others
    Motivating Self
    Motivation
    Motivational Strategies
    Motivation By The Spirit
    Motivations
    My Fitness
    My Purposes
    Narrative
    Narrative Inquiry
    Narrative Inquiry
    Natural Beauty
    Nature
    Neurological Process
    Opportunities
    Partnership
    Paying Attention
    Performance
    Personal Creativity
    Personal Development
    Personal Development Planning
    Perspective Change
    Planning
    Play
    Procrastination
    Purposes
    Reflection
    Relationships
    Remembering
    Retirement
    Role Model
    Sadness
    Sarendipity
    Seeing Potential
    Seeing Potential
    SEEK SENSE SHARE
    Self Motivation
    Self-Motivation
    Self Regulation
    Self-regulation
    Significant Personal Events
    Slogging
    Social Age
    Social Leadership
    Social Media
    Sorrow
    Spiritual
    Stories
    Survey Monkey
    Symbolism
    Teaching
    Teamwork
    Technology
    Tools
    Tradition
    Trajectories
    Twitter
    Using Technology
    Values
    Vision
    Visualisation
    Wellbeing
    Why?
    Willpower
    Work
    Working Out What You Have To Do
    Workshop
    Writing

    RSS Feed