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It is much easier to
develop new ideas than
it is to escape the old ones.
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As
I write this, the AMA Executive Council is about to begin a
two-day Strategic Planning session.
With my mind on that, a subject for this column was hard to
produce—that is until I had a conversation with a friend
concerning strategic planning. He used the phrase, "planning
to make the future happen." At first, this seemed a curious
grouping of words, but the more I thought about it, I
realized that it had many applications in life and in
aeromodeling.
When you think about it, nearly everything we do in regards
to our hobby is a matter of making the future happen. How
well we plan and the way we execute that plan will have a
big short-term and long-term effect on our future.
Each step in the process we go through when acquiring a new
model has the future in mind, and each step is important in
determining our activity in the future. Whether we are
buying an ARF or scratch-building a masterpiece, we are
planning to fly that model at some time, and each step of
the process will have an effect on what happens.
How long before the future "happens" can be a short time or
an extremely long time, depending on what we are doing.
Properly executing well-thought-out plans can create a long,
wonderful future of enjoyment of that model; hasty,
ill-conceived actions can have disastrous results
immediately or sometime in the future.
I suppose the same can be said for the sport/hobby we all
love so deeply. Making good plans and executing those plans
well will have an enormous effect on what happens later.
We cannot absolutely control our future with planning
because there is a certain level of the unknown, which makes
our lives worth living. The plans we develop can—and
should—include flexibility and contingencies for those
elements we cannot predict or control.
It may be easier to build that fuel tank into the model
permanently, but if the fuel line inside the tank fails, it
will mean the demise of the airplane. Extra planning to make
the tank removable could save the model in the future.
Careful planning with an eye toward contingencies can
increase the likelihood that the future will be as we would
like it to be.
Organizational planning isn't much different. No matter how
well you plan, there will always be situations that were not
considered during your planning process. It becomes a
balancing act between addressing those items that directly
move you toward your goal and directing your efforts toward
correcting problems that are bound to surface in the
execution of your plan.
Contingency planning, if allowed to overwhelm your thinking,
can paralyze your progress toward a goal. You spend so much
effort worrying about what might happen that you have no
time left to make anything happen. Conversely, if you plan
too rigidly and with too much optimism that everything will
work out perfectly, you are likely to fail because of some
little glitch that brings the whole process to a halt.
That balance is the tricky part of the planning process,
whether that plan is creating a new model to fly or planning
the future of a 70-year-old organization.
Tomorrow is going to be interesting.
I saw a quote the other day, which I cannot attribute to an
author, that was applicable as the AMA Executive Council
embarks on creating/refining a strategic plan: "It is much
easier to develop new ideas than it is to escape the old
ones."
MA
Til next month ...
Dave Brown, AMA president
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