The corporate obsession with planning, appropriate in principal often becomes just an exercise in managed optimism.
Many times I have witnessed, and been party to budgeting and planning sessions that are driven by a notion that all the bad stuff that has happened this year will not happen next year, and that the stars are at last aligned to a give us a “big one”, the bad stuff is behind us. This may sometimes be right, but other bad stuff usually takes the place of last years bad stuff, but we seem to be able to often tell ourselves that it won’t.
We often spend so much unproductive time planning — read kidding ourselves, that we get nothing useful done. A mate of mine, Tony Cassone has a truism he has been shouting for as long as I have known him, “son, you get one out of 10 for talking, the other 9 is for doing”
Once again, Tom Fishburne nails this tendency to corporate rose colored glasses with his biting “waterfall planning” cartoon.
Too true!