Goals and Plans - Help or Hindrance?

Last week I was enjoying a coffee with my landlady when she asked me a question that set me thinking. My landlady doesn’t fit the role stereotype, being almost twenty years my junior and great fun, without a hair curler in sight. She was sharing how she is trying to plot her future career and life goals, especially a dream she has of spending some years in Latin America. Knowing I’d lived in many places, she asked me what my strategy had been in such matters.

I couldn’t find a good answer. When I thought it through, I’ve never really had much of a strategy. Up to age 22 my dreams were really those of my parents. I just drifted into Shell, and more or less let things happen on instinct. Arguably that included marriage, and even separation. A big part of my plan for the next few years is to have no plan, but to live very much in the present. Anchored only by a solid commitment to a relationship, I’m ready to see where that leads and what might come along as far as activities are concerned.

Does that make me weak? Would I have achieved more or been happier if I’d had solid goals all the way through? My inclination is to say no. I’ve always had a decent compass, some self knowledge, a degree of openness, quite clear values, a fuzzy idea of what options would fit and what would not and a means of evaluating them as they arose, some concept of good outcomes, and a willingness to be surprised. The more I thought about Pamela’s question, the more I thought I might have stumbled on a winning formula.

We’ve all met examples of the opposite type of strategy, and conventional wisdom leads us to admire these characters. The precocious child of six who announces their future profession. The fellow undergraduate signalling their date of marriage and birth of all offspring. The subordinate who presents a plan for their whole life at an appraisal. The retiree who gives the impression that everything was pretty much pre-planned.

Goals and plans clearly have a role. All the above individuals have a clear sense of direction and can make clear decisions. They also can attract followers, and offer them clear signals. A business will struggle to survive long without goals and plans, as investors demand signals, and staff need mechanisms to allocate resources and to keep score. Armies need this even more, though sometimes we don’t seem remember that when we commit to military adventures.

Even in complex businesses, I sense an obsession with goals and plans going so far as to be counter-productive. Plans always have to make an assumption about context – be it markets, regulations, competitors. And such assumptions are always wrong. The best companies are those who can react intelligently to opportunities as they arise, and that is not usually those with rigid goals and plans. Agility and humility are great attributes. I am surprised that rolling planning has not been adopted more quickly across industry, and suggest it could be a source of strength for those willing to cast aside years of finance department attitudes and give it a try.

In politics at election time, journalists focus on policies. These have a role, yet how often has the world changed so much by the time the election is over that those policies get overtaken by events? It probably makes much more sense to judge based on values and on competence – and happily in most countries the public do just that.

Many sports and games illustrate the same point. Counter-attacking and flexible teams win soccer championships more often than conventional analysis would suggest. Martial arts are all about using the energy and commitment of an opponent to one’s own advantage. As a child I remember a wonderful game called L’Attaque. The title was a brilliant trick, as I learned that the way to win was to let the other side attack you. This usually works in Chess too.

Going back to the individual, I believe the arguments for a responsive strategy are even stronger, since the main advantage of a plan based approach, that of marshalling a team, are less relevant (though life partners always need to plan together). The second advantage of a clear plan is as a hedge against apathy, with plans acting as a spur, a personal sergeant major in one’s ear.

But it is easy to list many disadvantages to running your life by rigid goals and plans. Context changes so fast. We have no idea what opportunities lie ahead of us, not just when we are six but when we are sixty as well. While we are focussed in one direction, we easily miss what is going on at the periphery. Psychologically, a goal can become an expectation, and that sets it up as a preordained disappointment. The most bitter people often had the clearest goals.

I’m certainly not advocating fatalism. We are not without influence on what happens to us, and we should use that influence. Values and attitude matter, as do criteria to judge and take opportunities. And we can take many actions to bring more opportunities towards us. That is not fatalism, but a strategy of active readiness, which I believe is supported by most interpretations of beliefs about Higher Powers.

I suppose just now I’m testing out the limits of my own theory, deliberately minimising goals and plans. Perhaps I’ll slide into apathy, or fall into some other pitfall I haven’t foreseen, or simply not be able to resist slipping into some former corporate habits. On the other hand, perhaps I’ve stumbled upon an attitude that can be part of a key to serenity.