Is planning essential? And are plans really inconsequential?
Let’s start by examining the fundamental question implied by the title of this post: Is planning really valuable? Or is planning in and of itself worthless because it’s the plan that’s really valuable? If we believe that plans are valuable, planning is the activity of producing plans, and we infer that planning has little or no value independent of the plan it produces. It’s the plan that is valuable, not the planning. We could outsource the planning, or even buy a plan off the shelf and if it was the right plan, we’d be just as successful as if we did the planning ourselves.
Conversely, if we believe that planning is valuable, planning is an activity that involves something more than simply producing a plan. We believe this activity confers some value independently of the plan, and we believe that the plan without the planning is significantly less valuable. Outsourcing planning or buying a plan off the shelf won’t work because we’d lose the value of the planning itself.
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When we think of the plan as a subset of the knowledge obtained through planning, we see it in a different light. It’s like a fossil. It reflects the knowledge, but it isn’t the knowledge. It’s an imprint in sediment outlining the size and shape of the knowledge.