Adapt or Die: Effective Planning...

(or Every False Promise is a Lie)

Now that you are clearly enrolled in the importance of timely and humane communication and the variations of the way people learn, we want to get enough heat built up under you so that you do not follow the fate of the frogs described in the last section!

Effective planning is what this site is all about. Once you get people operating with integrity, communicating clearly, and fully serving or responding to the true customer demand of their daily work routine, you are ready to enjoy the amazing gains and value of advanced planning.

So often people seem to think that planning is a dumb waste of time because you can't ever really guess what the customer's going to do before it happens. Well yes, forecasting is an art that seldom gets much appreciation--because it is always wrong! But, it turns out that the mental activity and shared communication that comes from planning actually keeps everybody awake to what they expect to happen, so that few participants are able to let the surprises slip by unnoticed! In other words, if you plan how your are going to spend your money before you get paid, and something comes along to suck it out of your pocket, you are going to be very watchful as to what consumes your resources. If you don't, none of your plans will come to pass. It's the same thing with allocations of people's time and materials that you have/expect or plan to buy in your company.

If every employee had a stake in the spoils of their actions, they would be much more careful about how they spend. And if you can get people awake enough to fully value and experience the intrinsic profits as well as the extrinsic profits that come from their job, any pre-planning that can help make the experience more rewarding will be fun and interesting, as well as cost effective.

But integrity cannot be built upon a false ground. And human egos being what they aren't in the 00's, well, maybe now you start to see why so much attention goes to the person's understanding of the job & gains (see Mr. Ohno's Workplace Management article).

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