Planning
Is planning always a good idea? Are there cases where it's best not to plan? Is winging it sometimes the best strategy?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by TellMeStudios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're talking about whether planning what you're going to do is a bad idea.
Speaker B:Chris, is planning stuff a bad idea? Well that obviously depends but there were a couple of cases recently in British politics where that seems to be the case, that planning things has had a negative effect. A prominent example was the Labour Party at its recent conference. John Macdonald, the shadow chancellor, mentioned that the Labour Party was preparing for government and as part of that preparation for government they were doing sort of scenario planning based on a run on the pound as a result of Labour coming to government and this had an effect of making it look as though Labour coming to power might correlate with a run on the pound. So the fact that they were planning for something which is ordinarily a good idea actually had a sort of, yes not a reassuring effect, it had a sort of unnerving effect on people.
Speaker A:But just to say, I don't think the problem there was planning, I think the problem there was telling people that you're planning. I think it's a communications thing.
Speaker B:Yes, that's true up to a point but generally in government, so for example the UK government at the time of the Brexit referendum refused to do any planning, they actually didn't do any planning for what would happen in the event that Brexit occurred.
Speaker C:Because their policy was that it wasn't going to happen.
Speaker B:Their policy was that it wasn't going to happen but they rightly I think interpreted that in planning for it to happen they would be acknowledging that this was a likely thing to occur. So I think in big public policy areas it's impossible to keep planning secret on most issues. The highest sort of security issues, there's a small group of people who deal with that but for large public policy issues planning is impossible to keep secret. So actually sometimes under those kinds of circumstances it potentially pays not to do the planning. Nick?
Speaker C:Yeah, I think this is a big, big issue here. I mean so the government is getting a lot of criticism from all areas of the press at the moment for apparently not being planned up enough about Brexit and Brexit negotiations and so on. And I think there's a lot of naivety in the way that people, in what people are expecting from the government. I mean it's a negotiation, sort of rule number one of negotiations is you don't tell people what your strategy is. We cannot infer that the government doesn't have a strategy from the fact that it isn't telling anyone what it is. Things like saying yes we're going to be prepared for a no deal Brexit is absolutely what you're meant to do. You have to make it look like you're fine with the negotiation failing. I mean the sort of theory of negotiation is that there's a pot of value on the table and you're basically arguing about how to divvy it up and there's going to be some, you've got an outside option, what's the minimum you'll accept from that apportionment and you want to make it look like that minimum is quite high so that the opponent has to give you more. So it makes total sense that the government isn't telling anyone what its calculus is and it also makes sense for them to plan for a no deal Brexit. So the government's behaviour is indistinguishable from just good negotiation strategy here. However, it might also be the case that they really don't have a plan. I don't know if we know one way or the other and if so who is actually the guardian of those plans. But it's very well understood that you don't tell people. You don't show people your cards in a game of poker. You'll definitely lose if you do that. You don't tell people what your plan is in a negotiation or in a number of other different strategic situations. The question is, is it sometimes good to not have a plan at all, to not even have that plan in the first place? And I think that's where we get into the interesting zone, as Chris said. First of all, there's the argument of secrecy that actually if we were being explicit, if we wrote it down, it could get leaked and then we're doomed. We're scuppered because the other side has effectively seen our cards. But there might be other reasons as well. There might be reasons of actually being able to leave things flexible and leave things to discretion, meaning that you're able to be more improvisatory if you're in a situation where there is a lot of uncertainty or a lot of, you know, where the strategic environment might change quite rapidly. You don't necessarily want to be locked into a plan. And then, of course, planning itself has costs. It might be that the costs of making and maintaining a plan outweigh whatever slight improvement you might get from better decisions.
Speaker B:Yeah. I mean, I also think there are benefits to not having a plan which occur from genuine spontaneity. So, you know, in a negotiation, you might form a better relationship with the other partner by genuinely responding to what they're doing. If you look at the difference in reception of public speaking, for example, between something that's scripted and something which is, you know, generally spontaneous, generally audiences respond better to the thing which comes across as being spontaneous. And I think, you know, there may be some truth to that in a negotiating environment as well.
Speaker C:It takes a lot of practice to be able to improvise spontaneously. That's right. Yeah. It's a sort of jazz paradox. I mean, I think there's an interesting... Let's take sort of the UK's nuclear use doctrine, which no one knows what it is, right? So, we don't even know if it exists. We've got a deliberate strategic ambiguity that our policy is not to tell anyone when we would use nuclear weapons. And that's actually pretty good. I mean, it means that, you know, the hypothetical enemy, you know, doesn't know what response it's going to meet with. You know, as if we, let's say we drew a line down the middle of Germany and said, well, you know, if any enemy forces set foot west of this line, we'll nuke them. Then, you know, it's merely an invitation to drive right up to that line and stop there, you know? It would have to be a red line, presumably. A big, big red, big red line. Or thin. Or would it be a thin red line? I don't know. And so, you know, strategic ambiguity there, it helps us. And it means that if we had, let's say we had some rule, you know, when, you know, X numbers of incoming missiles, you know, from somewhere will respond with nuclear weapons. The problem is that then, you know, you might find that actually that at the time, for some hitherto unimagined contextual reason, that was no longer the optimal response. And having this deliberate policy of strategic ambiguity lets you, you know, lets you make those decisions at the time. But of course, you know, it has this big downside, which is that it actually makes working out what the best thing to do is very difficult. The question is no longer what should we do under this range of circumstances, but what kind of processes ought we to have? What kind of people ought we to have? What kinds of decision processes do we want to implement, you know, in these kinds of circumstances? So it becomes, you know, becomes something much more like you're having to kind of build a robust system without necessarily knowing what it's going to do or how it's going to behave, which is a harder problem than merely appraising a strategy which says, you know, under these circumstances, we're going to do X.
Speaker A:I think, you know, we're straying, sometimes we're straying towards a different discussion, which is behavior and transparency of intention and that kind of thing, which I think we've sort of covered elsewhere. But I think you've come back onto it there on the issue with planning.
Speaker B:Yeah, no, just to sort of move it back into the issue of, you know, spontaneity versus planning. I think there are a number of arguments as to why we might as individuals perform better when we're making it up as we go along and flying by the seat of our pants. And, you know, there's in sort of cognitive psychology, there are a number of pieces of evidence which are starting to show the power of being forced to think spontaneously. So, for example, in, you know, very often we have competition between internal and external thoughts. So internal thought being sort of things we're dredging up from our memory in our own mind and external thought being our monitoring of external stimuli. And you can see that where, you know, examples of where you're sort of trying to listen to something, but your mind is wandering, you're going into internal thought, you're supposed to be doing external thought and internal thought is competing with it. Or where you want to think of something, you want to remember something, and so you close your eyes and sort of try and shut out external stimuli. It's very difficult for us to combine those two things at the same time. But there's some evidence to show that when we are having to think spontaneously and creatively, that competition becomes, we're better able to merge those two types of thinking. And so actually, cognitively, we're able to perform better, you know, that's one theory behind what's behind the essence of creative thought and why, you know, we generate better ideas under those circumstances.
Speaker A:It's interesting to hear that because I, in some senses, I sometimes, let's say just making it purely personal, sometimes there's an element of I like sort of making a plan, let's say I'm making a plan of what I want to do with my career or life over the next five years, and I kind of like sort of thinking that up and doing that. But actually, I don't like the feeling of following that plan. And I find planning a little bit restrictive. And it reminds me of when I was at university, a friend on the same course as me, we were talking together about our approach to life. And one of the things he liked was sort of seeing what's coming at you in life, the different challenges and risks and so on. And sort of, as he put it, shimmying in and out and avoiding those, and you got a lot of pleasure out of that. And I guess that, in a way, was planning. And what I said, what I really enjoy is sort of, you don't know what's coming, or you see stuff coming, and you just go straight on, head into it. And just, I find a certain joy in that kind of unexpected.
Speaker C:Hence your frequent trips to A&E.
Speaker A:And well, this is the thing. He's now a lawyer and sort of lives quite a stable and quite nice life. And I'm not. You're still a bohemian. Yeah, exactly. You know, I've lived this, as you know, I'm sort of quite a beatnik.
Speaker C:Well, there is this, I mean, there's a cliche that's, you know, it's true. It's a true cliche, which is, and it's been put into the mouths of almost every military, you know, thinker in the last thousand years, which is, well, more the one that goes, you know, plans are useless, but planning is essential. And I kind of subscribe to that. I think my own, and this, really, my own experience, having, you know, worked in the, in sort of the intelligence analysis area in government, is that actually a lot of the decision makers, so these might be people who are formulating a policy about what we're going to, you know, what equipment we're going to buy, or, you know, what kinds of contingencies we should plan for and how we should respond if a certain country were to, you know, were to collapse into chaos. That actually, often, the value is added, not at the stage where you're thinking critically and saying, well, how many people do we need here, and what would be the effect of there, and where's, which airfield, you know, are we going to use? The value is added when you are exposing people to these possibilities, you know, and actually just getting them to think what, you know, roughly what would we do in, under these circumstances. You know, if there was a civil war here, and then, you know, often people will sort of think, oh, I hadn't even, you know, I hadn't even crossed my mind that there was a possibility. That then stimulates enough sort of latent thought that, you know, when those sorts of things actually do happen, you know, people are prepared, not necessarily because there's an off-the-shelf plan that they can, you know, pull down and use, but they already have the sort of basic idea, the basic ingredients are there already, you know, in the store cupboard, as it were, to be sort of mixed together at the right ratio. I don't know how much, but I can stretch this metaphor for, I think it's run out.
Speaker A:I think so too. We need to wrap up. But before we do, so, yeah, I mean, how much of a planner are you, Chris? I bet you're a big planner.
Speaker B:Yes, I am a big planner. I like to figure out the different permutations that could emerge and sort of think roughly what I'm going to do. But I also sort of am happy to put myself in a set of circumstances, knowing that something will, you know, through necessity, you will generate a response and a plausible one. Adapt, improvise, overcome. That's precisely, yes, another cliche that I try not to adhere to. But yeah, I think the issue of whether planning is a good idea or not is really task specific. You know, there are things that are adversarial and involve you having to interact with another person. You know, you need to have a level of spontaneity about that. You can't conceive of every possible option they're going to come back with. And, you know, equally planning to reassure, you know, so if it's a set of circumstances that people are worried about and you plan for it and you talk about it, you know, a bit like the sort of government policy of duck and cover when we had the Cold War and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, you know, duck and cover was an attempt to reassure people. It's planning for something that people were worried about and saying there's a solution, you know, here's how we mitigate that risk. Where I think planning actually creates alarm is where it's something that people aren't actually concerned about or thinking about as being plausible. And if you start saying I'm planning for this event, you know, of aliens invading or whatever, and suddenly it validates that possibility and the plausibility of that possibility.
Speaker C:You know, when you get a phone call from the school and it's like, first thing I want to say is, don't worry. You know, Becky's fine. And you're like, oh, my God, what's happened to her? You know, the reassuring thing is actually, you know, but it's interesting you mentioned duck and cover because that, as I understand it, caused a lot of, caused a sort of unwitting escalation in the Cold War because the Soviets thought that the Americans were kind of planning to be able to win a nuclear war. And I think some Soviet intelligence analysts interpreted duck and cover and the associated sort of, you know, civil planning as being sort of, well, if we can, meaning that the Americans would be kind of more happy to have a nuclear war, you know, in the first place. Go on. No, I mean, it just, but no, I mean, that's just an interesting aside, really.
Speaker A:Well, I don't think it is an aside because it's, I think that brings us back round nicely to the beginning of the question is planning, is planning a bad thing? It depends. I think the first thing you said, Chris, well, it depends on the situation. And there's another example where, like the run on the pound that Labour was purported to be planning for, you know, had negative unforeseen consequences. And the same with this, with duck and cover. Also, when someone else got wind of it, had, again, potentially negative effects. So I think it sort of brings us right back down nicely. That's right.
Speaker B:And planning has an impact on how things are going to turn out. I think that's the key thing to remember is by planning for something you are having an impact on how events are likely to turn out.
Speaker C:I mean, you know, decision making consists of lots of different things. Right. So you've got planning isn't just about working out what we think is going to happen and what we're going to do. A key part of it is working out what you're trying to achieve and to be consistent about that. And, you know, again, that's something that's valuable, even though that doesn't by itself determine a course of action. Actually, a lot of ambiguity about, you know, in policymaking is because the government hasn't really quite worked out what it cares about. And I think, you know, in the case of Brexit, for example, you know, sitting down saying, well, how much do we actually want these particular outcomes will be valuable before you've even decided, you know, what you think is on the table.
Speaker A:And as I have learned from this series of podcasts with yourselves is it often always comes back to, well, what are your aims? What do you want to achieve?
Speaker C:Good. If that's your takeaway, I feel like, you know, it's great. Now all you need to do is actually answer that question and then you'll be sorted.
Speaker A:I'm going to go off and write a plan about it. OK, gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. My name's Fraser McGruer. We've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. That's all for now. Until next time. Bye bye.
