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Saturday 11 April 2020

The planning illusion




There are those walking among us who seem to think that our response to the coronavirus debacle should have been a matter of rolling out a ready-made pandemic plan. A well-oiled marshalling of identified resources perhaps, although it is not always clear what the plan should have been.

It’s an interesting illusion because there is a significant political divide between those who think planning is a widespread human ability and those who know it isn’t one of our strong points. Much political posturing is based on the planning illusion. The main political division in the UK is between Labour the lunatic planners and increasingly demented Tories who pretend to be planners but don’t really believe in it.

Yet it is obvious enough that nothing really new is ever planned, everything evolves from something else. Every event evolves from earlier events but is never quite the same as any previous event and will never be exactly the same as any subsequent event. Any response has to be based on where we are now and on similar past experiences.

We can plan, but we aren’t very good at it because that’s not how the natural world works. It has unpredictability built in. What do we plan for after the coronavirus debacle? Another pandemic, a massive meteor strike, a huge volcanic eruption, catastrophic climate change, pervasive surveillance, artificial intelligence, an ennui pandemic, political decay? I plan to have another coffee - based on previous experience.

8 comments:

Sam Vega said...

At work, we had "away days" where we role-played imaginary future catastrophes affecting the organisation. No real catastrophe would go according to plan, of course, but such planning was useful in that it gave us confidence that the systems worked and that we could do things remotely.

I imagine most government departments would love to do more planning and future-proofing, but find themselves fighting fires in the present, and can't spare the staff and the time.

johnd2008 said...

Is not the saying that" no plan survives first contact with the enemy ?"

Scrobs. said...

The failing media love the blame game, it's so much easier than actually doing their job, which is to inform, investigate, search out stories etc.

The BBC are probably the worst culprits at this, and even then they're not very good at it.

It's dead easy to tell someone that 'they should have thought of that' after the event. It's the sort of rubbish Corbyn said early on, but luckily, the opposition are keeping their heads down, as much of this is their fault...


...isn't it?

Anonymous said...

'Exercise Cygnus' anyone?

Graeme said...

The Swan

A K Haart said...

Sam - I imagine some of them would love to do nothing else but planning and future-proofing.

john - yes and it's a saying worth keeping in mind.

Scrobs - it is dead easy and the BBC at least ought to restrain itself and be more constructive, which doesn' prevent it from being critical.

Anon - I assume they will revisit that when this is all over.

Graeme - not as uncommon as we'd like.

Richard Joyce said...

I enjoy your blog but you are wrong.
Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery and Contigency Planning are very real and needed. You plan for the emergency no matter what it is and practice the plans an a frequent basis and update and enhance on the results.
It is expensive and time consuming but without it the whole of the rest of society would be where we are now because of the inept NHS and politicians who see to have no commercial world experience - they are just guessing.

A K Haart said...

Richard - we did some of that but fortunately it was not put to the test because we would never have put in the necessary redundancies. I do take your point, but is there an element of the no true Scotsman fallacy too?