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When Planning for Others

Management Research Center, College of Business Administration, University of Rochester.

The systems analysts presented a mathematically optimum plan to the management, but the plan is still not operational.

The plans for production call for 720 units per day, but the foreman reports averaging only 580 units daily.

The finance committee agreed to seek advice on investment strategy, but would not follow it when it was given.

The staff proposals were summarily rejected by line management as lacking in practicality.

These failures of plans to be accepted or operated effectively could have been due to a variety of reasons other than the lack of quality in the plans themselves. The systems analysts may have felt that management lacked sufficient mastery of mathematics to appreciate fully the elegance of the optimum plan, and peremptorily asked management to accept the mathematics on the analysts' authority as experts. The foreman may have regarded it as an usurpation of a management prerogative to accept suggestions for changes in plans from his workers. The investment advisers may have failed to consider adequately the fears, hopes, and expectations of those they were advising; or the staff may have found itself in a competitive struggle with line management, who in turn saw their security threatened by staff's proposals.

In the text that follows, a close look will be taken at these and other reasons for the failure of plans to be carried out, and how the likelihood of such failures might be reduced when planning for others.

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