We don't live in an ideal world. Oh! You knew that already! Sorry about that. But, we don't live in an ideal world. Just take a look at the crap that gets thrown at a planner everyday.Planning constructs are supposed to be built on enormous amount of information, or at least what remains after sifting through that amount. The core of planning is supposed to be inspired by pieces of information that most people failed to notice. But, what comes in doesn't resemble that possibility in any damn way. A handful of mundane information, provided on a need to know basis (who the bloody hell decides what needs to be known, when nobody knows what more could be known!) makes perfect fodder for planning in the eyes of the people who provide them (clients, client servicing, researchers and the whole gamut).
It is wonderful to see people asking a farmer to explain the weather, or a physicist to explain why Windows Vista is not working on my PC. I guess, for the uninitiated knowledge is just born on trees, like the apple that fell on Newton. But, unfortunately (for them and Newton) it never is that easy. Years of dawdling with the most abstract of abstracts mathematics preceded the apple back then, as it does now in everything that deals with knowledge.
Hannibal lost, because of insufficient information, and Ho Chi Minh won because he knew everything about everything in Vietnam. Us, poor planners, can't plan to do any better than the giants for the life of us. I guess I'll have to figure out a way to drive that point into some thick skulls that bend nails when hammered.
I wrote this in 2007.
