032 Why plan?

This episode raises the philosophical question of 'why plan?', and what role does planning play in our day-to-day lives? We all have needs and wants, and it is the conscious or subconscious plans that help us to exert some control in our aim of achieving them. We engage in relationship plans, financial goals, career planning, and chosen uses of leisure time. It is a natural human activity that can become quickly mired in the bureaucratic jargon of goal-setting, care planning, support planning, where we talk of being person-centred when our systems are imposing service-centred solutions on people. It can be a conflict between a requirement for order and a way of managing chaos, even though some people claim to prefer chaos. Plans can't guarantee success but they can help to build confidence, apply order and structure, focus our energy, provide a road map. In the event of a crisis we have means of responding with our own personal crisis plans; and in anticipation of something desired going wrong we should have some kind of contingency plans.