Plans can fail , You cannot

(image taken from beatingcowdens.com)

I was surprised by this new phrase made by my friend Siva

“Plans can fail but you cannot”

He said this with no great visible thought process, but how thoughtful this is.

This was a revealing moment when I was feeling that my plans always fail. But its not about the plans failing or specifically “my” planning getting failed. It was the plan which was destined to fail. It was a default criteria for the plan to go through the process of failure in the very least. It was the first step of the planning process. This was the condition by default. This was a position that a plan cannot miss or even try escape.

The failure of the plan is the stepping stone for the plan to prosper. The plan here cannot be something personal. In this sense , the planner has to keep himself detached from the plan. It is not personal at all.

The plan is set a standard different and not compared or constrained by the background of the planner. The plan is a stand alone entity. It has to be viewed as an whole entity in itself.

So what do you do when a plan fails, start building it again.

(image taken from www.g21.com.au )

Some may think that this idea is of making the vision narrower and see the specifics and keep the overall outline away. This is not the case. For even an average planning process that is devoid of a belonging to a bigger system, the idea of considering the plan as a closed system works. The plan is a means to itself. It is the beginning, it is the starting point. It is not the end in itself. A plan is constrained by the plan itself, in this way it is not dependent on the planner, the planning process, the thoughts, the environmental variables, the consideration and implications by related systems or the effect of the overall system on it. Such a thinking is made possible because plan is considered as a verbal form of thought process. It is completely qualitative and devoid of existence. It is in paper, in bits and bytes but not in physical , realised, implemented or developed form.

A plan can then very well fail. It has the potential to and it is always tending to fail. This may be a version of the Murphy’s law. but not that straight forward. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” says Murphy’s law. But according to Siva only the “Plan can fail, the person cannot”. A person involved in planning should not be bogged down by the implications of a failed plan. The same way the law of detachment of Bhagavad Gita or the Vedas could tell us the importance of freeing ourselves from the idea that we feel we own.

(image taken from http://www.candocareersolutions.ca/business-plan-writer.jpg)

There is a concept that the employee performance improves when a sense of belonging develops between the work and the worker. This belonging should be kept at a safe distance that the work and plan does not keep you too much engaged that the plan or work would be the reason for everything. This explanation could be disputed, due to varied nature of human thought process.

Nevertheless, what Siva said holds true “Plans can fail, but you cannot”.