March 29, 2016
Executive Summary
In a previous career, I was a strategic- and operational-level planner. One of the many quotations I learned early on was from one of World War II’s great leaders who himself was an effective staff officer, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Speaking at a gathering of American business leaders well into his second term as President, Ike related a story about a group of officers who were working out how to employ large formations before the Great War broke out. These officers were using maps of the central terrain in Europe, but their superiors at Leavenworth told them to use maps with more familiar U.S. terrain including Gettysburg and other Civil War venues. It seems that planning for the last war is not something new. Unknowingly, the planners’ first intuition to use European battlegrounds was correct; a few years later the maps selected were dead center on the battlefields of 1914–1918, but in Ike’s view, the skills they developed in the planning effort were more important than the plans they produced. He felt so strongly about the value of the planning process that he told these industrialists, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ‘emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning” (remarks at the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, November 14, 1957). Later, as a planner, I told my teammates that planners learn to plan, and then plan to plan again. Nothing was ever fixed because a plan was only a reflection of the information available at the time. The key to success was how well planners learned from their experiences. This constant renewing is essential for developing the minds of those involved than whether the plan would be useful.