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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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