The Importance of Planning in the Real World

President Eisenhower’s Quote on the Uselessness of Plans

President Eisenhower’s quote on the uselessness of plans and indispensability of the planning process emphasizes the fact that plans rarely translate to the reality of the situations that they seek to tackle. According to Dalcher (2), plans are merely educated speculation in which a person or group engages to ensure that they understand the situation as well as all of the variables involved. As a result, plans are almost always destined to fail since any contradictions between real-world events and plan details mean that the plan itself failed to live up to the challenges faced in reality (Chaneta 165). However, it also becomes vital to note that plans can help a person or team to determine goals and objectives that define the reason for developing the plan in the first place, making plans useless in themselves but useful as part of an ongoing goal-oriented decision-making process.

Eisenhower’s Perceptions of Planning as Indispensable

Eisenhower’s perceptions of planning as indispensable is a notion that proves itself repeatedly in the real world when considering that planning involves active deliberation over decisions, consequences, and overall contributions to the achievement of set goals (Chaneta 166). While plans are useless as individual instruments, the planning process repeatedly produces plans as previous ones become irrelevant in the face of changing realities. As a result, a person or team’s ability to develop an agile planning process becomes a determinant of the success that they can expect from their plans (Dalcher 6). In this way, the planning process is indispensable since it allows a person or team to develop plans that have increased chances of surviving their contact with the real-world. This means that planning precedes plans, making the planning process the key element that defines whether or not any plans that people make can achieve the targeted goals.

Works Cited

Chaneta, Isaac. “Planning and Decision–Making.” International Journal of Innovative Research and Development 3.2 (2014). 165-167.

Dalcher, Darren. ”Why Planning Is More Important than Plans.” PM World Journal (2016).