Why Bother Planning?

Planning: Why Bother?

         Michael D. Breen

2014 will be a game-changing year for Robertson. Fair dinkum? Yes. The Wingecarribee Council is to be planning the future of Robertson. So what difference will another Council initiative have? And what can we do about it?

Robertson’s future sits in the hands of the people of Robertson. But maybe we don’t want to know that. Maybe it is easier to say that noting will change or that everything will change and there is nothing we  can do about it. Though the plan, which is developed this year, is the recipe, the blueprint, for current and future Robertson.

         Towns, villages and cities have lives of their own. They spring up, grow or don’t grow. They can flourish or decline into a few old chimneys and weed covered graveyards. They can be happy places, which attract healthy people or spooky unattractive hovels.

         Planning can make the difference between a liveable, attractive town or a dump of a place. Success depends on the way the planning is done, the fit between the not-yet-born futures and the past and how much the planning authority, in this case the Wingecarribee Council, and the locals own and want their plan to succeed.

         If you think planning is hard to understand or something to leave to others; think again. You plan things every day. A shopping list is a plan. It is a short-term plan for shopping, a longer-term plan for eating and a longer plan still for a nourished life. A recipe is a plan for preparing a dish. A map is a plan to get to where you want to go.

Each plan has three simple bits: Where are you now? Where do you want to go? How are you going to get there? Whether it is a plan to win the grand final or develop Robertson it will have those three bits.

A Robertson plan needs to describe where Robertson sits now, it people, its resources, its problems and bright spots. These can be put in boxes: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Then the planning will need to look to the future and describe how Robertson will be in the future. This step is sometimes called a Future Search.  It involves imagining what we want for our children and their children, dreams, hopes and concerns.

All this happens inside the rest of the world, New South Wales, Australia and the nations, which form the globe.

Just think for a moment how you would show a grand or great grand parent around the world we live in now? Could they have been expected to see the developments from horses to cars, from kerosene lamps to electric lights and then to all the computing, mobile phones and stuff? While planning we need to think courageously about what kind of future Robertson will have imposed on it from the outside and what kind of future we can build inside those limitations and opportunities.

         Finally the plan needs to describe the ways to build that future plan in clear, doable and measurable steps. This will make up the skeleton, the chassis or the blueprint for the Robertson of the Future.  Of course the plan needs to be funded and resourced so that it can be carried out.

Once I was concluding the future planning for an airline. The framework and the details were laid out in steps the managers and the staff were committed to making it happen. I asked, “What could ruin this whole plan and all our week’s work?” There was an outcry about being negative or pessimistic. But in answer to the question one person said, “If we had a major incident where a key plane became unserviceable”. So I had them tell me what their back up plan would do and how they would preserve the plan they had developed. They came up with a series of steps, a sort of emergency plan to keep the airline functioning. The next morning a Saturday, as it happened, a plane’s landing gear failed, the plane skidded sideways off the runway and ruined a wing. They simply carried out the steps of their emergency plan without too much disruption or fuss.

This illustrates that good planning is an exercise in responding to key questions, often the ones we don’t want to look at and learning to together to find answers we all agree on. So the building of the plan also builds the team to carry out the plan while building the community itself.