Plans and Ops

I was so glad to have my daughter and granddaughter in residence yesterday. I really needed the morale boost their mere presence is capable of inducing. I had to attend the annual dinner held by the regional planning organization we work with. I really like and enjoy working with these people but sitting through a dinner with planning oriented speeches is not my idea of a fun evening; especially when I have the First Blog Reader entertaining at home.

This goes back to my Army days. Combat arms officers, especially in the infantry, tend to migrate later in their career towards either plans or operations. There’s a built in friction since operators hold planners in contempt for creating unrealistic plans and planners rail against operations for failing to fully realize and execute the brilliance of the plans they so painstakingly concoct. This is a vast oversimplification but it’s a baseline for understanding the relationship. As you can probably tell I was always current operations.  I had my share of run-ins with planners who at times were a little too proud of their genius. There’s a saying in the Army - “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, meaning the enemy gets a vote and will not always follow the carefully constructed script the planner predicted. My problem with certain planners was their massaging of enemy reactions to fit their plan and ignoring other options. That’s where the current ops guys came in. I always found that a lot more entertaining, dealing with the situation on the ground versus being immersed in endless, usually flawed, predictive analysis.

The Dinner Last Night

That’s a long winded way of saying the same type relationship exists in my current work. The planners envision certain things working that don’t have a chance in the real world but if they’re good enough salesmen they can force an attempt. Luckily these are a good bunch who take their failures in stride without blaming operations if their plans don’t succeed. The unfortunate part are these dinners, which as their partners we’re expected to attend. I tried to pull the “granddaughter visiting” card with my excellent boss but he stood firm and said I had to appear.

He himself pulled out late in the day because of a doctor’s appointment which will provide excellent fodder for future discussions of this type affair. My operations manager and I did have a good time during the cocktail hour and they made the grave mistake of putting our table up at the front of the room near the speakers. I don’t think any of them saw me trying to cut my wrists with the butter knife as they droned on. The head of the planning agency stood up for what was supposed to be a ten minute speech. Thirty minutes later she was still going strong, having covered in glorious detail everything her agency had accomplished including a riveting discussion of their redesigned logo. After this experience the political boss took pity on us and allowed us to sneak out. I think he didn’t want to see where our table discussion would descend to with another speech. At any rate I did get home in time to spend some time with the wife and daughter, so overall – a very good night; at least the second half.