Every year I order a new, pocket-sized, spiral-bound weekly planner. I don’t respond to the “reminder” page bound into September, but I try to place my order by mid-October because one year I delayed my plan until after Christmas and found myself anxiously trawling the shelves at an office supply store. So, even this much of my plan is less than ideal. In that instance I settled for a different but similar model, and while this did not ruin 2009 it forced me to adjust. I learned by experience that the problem was not really the planner. It was me, the “plannee,” and even with the preferred planner the problem remains me. I make plans, but I fail to execute the plans effectively.
But there is a reason for using the planner. Every Sunday night I open the page showing the five or six days ahead, to make a plan. Certain things must be done: I have deadlines and obligations to other people that must be met. Other things should be done too, and more could be done if I strategize how I will proceed through the week. I know all this, but still I fail to check off every entry in the weekly plan, and there are reasons for this too. The underlying reason is human nature, my nature. I fail to account for all the unknowable complications and distractions that will interrupt my plans.
Still, I want that plan. Doesn’t everyone want a plan? No doubt Day-Timer and Amazon.com and the individual seller who executes my purchase are glad for my planning. It’s something they can rely on, make plans around. My planning enriches their data. Planning is based on information, and better information improves the planning.
That information, i.e., data, is meant to quantify human behavior without the possibility of failure introduced by human nature. The sellers get the benefit of my planning without the risk of me failing to execute the plan.
Around our office we are regularly asked to plan or “forecast” the year or the quarter ahead: How much we expect to take in, how much we expect to spend, when and where we plan to travel, special projects, publishing dates, and so forth. Increasingly, the importance of planning is not just to maintain individual discipline or to achieve some level of reliability and preparedness for our colleagues, but to allow others to anticipate their own work.
Visiting with a colleague this month, each of us realized that planning on this collaborative, commercial level is increasingly impossible. He knows what projects he’ll be working on in 2020, but he remains uncertain about the business conditions in which he’ll operate and how his organization will respond to them. There is a lot of information available from economic models, consumer data, employment data, etc., but there is uncertainty in our forecasting because all the reliable information is widely available, and all the risk resides in our personal assessment of the conditions we face.
Even reliable facts are liable (even likely) to change instantly, forcing everyone to adjust his plans. The global economy is not only dynamic and instantaneous; it’s reactive. Plans and economics are as likely to be overturned by one person’s impulse or failure as by unreliable data or natural causes.
Consider the looming global trade war with China, a country fairly committed to planning economic and social development on a mass scale, and willing to roll over human nature if it impedes the progress of those plans.
Our disputes with that trading partner are based on actual conditions, with much documentable evidence. Nearly everyone agrees on the conclusions of those facts, and it’s impossible to revert to the cooperative tone we have maintained in the arrangement up to now. Still, the whole engagement has a distinctly personal quality. President Trump uses his particular style of negotiation to raise and pursue particular points, and while there is a prospect of a “deal” by mid-December, no one really knows if it will or can happen, what it may entail or what its effects may be. There is no data for any of it. That’s at the core of the uncertainties we all share.
