How Do I Plan? How Do You Plan?

I teach this topic in my resource management class. So when someone asks “How”, I’m going to have a complex and textbook answer.

The way people in general plan goals is to:

• Derive a goal from their values
• Clarify the goal (in terms of who, what, where, how, when, etc.)
• Assess the resources needed (and whether they’re enough)
• Make an auxiliary plan of where to get more resources (sometimes)
• Develop standards (in terms of what success looks like)
• Set a sequence of actions to guide the actions needed to carry out the implementation of the goal.

Do people really follow these steps? Unless we do everything without thinking, we do. The more complex and important the goal, the more obviously it looks like this. But these steps are more or less happening even if the goal is fixing a quick dinner. Think of following a recipe; the steps in the recipe follow this pattern. The person lays out standards — I need to add these ingredients in the right types and amounts. I have to follow a specific sequence of combining them — there’s my sequence of actions.

Plans at the spur of the moment may go through these steps quickly — think of deciding on the fly to go out to eat at a restaurant you’re passing by. You look at the menu costs; you check your pocket. Then you go in, knowing that the wait person will ask you if you want something to drink as they hand you a menu, then you will look over the menu and decide what you want, then you will tell the waitress. Standards and sequences.

Look at the step where resources are assessed. Not everyone looks at finding the resources if they don’t have them ready. Only people who are comfortable with change do that because it creates a new goal they perhaps haven’t counted on. People who are not comfortable with change stick with the goals they’ve always set, which we could call maintenance goals because they maintain a current way of life.

This is not the answer the prompt asked for. I was supposed to write how I personally set goals. But it answers the question. Other than this, what do you need to know?