126 Teaching Minds

126 Teaching Minds review (as the military calls the analysis process that takes place after a plan has been implemented). Teaching planning means teaching about goals, how they typi- cally are achieved, what obstacles might be encountered, and how to deal with them. The principles of planning are the same no matter what domain you are in, so children can learn to plan birthday par- ties, hikes, class trips, how to deal with their problems, how to treat their little sister, how to get along with their parents, and so on. This process can be learned by copying, seeing how others deal with these things, adapting a plan that has worked before, and so on. A teacher who tries to teach planning from first principles is teaching something that is easily forgotten as well as teaching a process that doesn’t occur that much in real life. Chefs adapt old recipes or parts of old recipes. Generals adapt old battle plans or parts of old battle plans. Computer programmers use code that has worked before. Planning without a pri- or plan in mind really is quite unusual and generally not a good idea. Planning, like diagnosis, should be a basic part of all curricula in school at all ages. People make plans all the time. They plan their lunch, they plan their day, they plan their trips, they plan their er- rands, and, of course, they plan their lives. It is astonishing that we don’t teach planning all the time in every aspect of life. But we don’t because this doesn’t seem very academic. Since it is not explicitly taught to children, it is reasonable to ask how we might best teach planning to adults. Corporations want to teach financial planning, resource planning, supply chain planning, creating business plans, creating marketing plans, and so on. Planning is, in fact, one of the major preoccupations of business, as well it should be. So, how do we teach it? The problem here is that planning really works in only one way. It is relies on a case base. We plan by adapting old plans. That’s how we do it. We store old plans and we retrieve them when we need them again; we change them so they apply to the new situation or change them so that this time they will work out when they failed before. But we always Start with an old plan. New planners, those we are trying to teach how to plan, cannot help but do this, even if they do not have a relevant old plan to work from. They simply will choose the best plan they have, even though it might not be all that germane to the current situation. Proverbs—for example, to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail—don’t come from nowhere. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023872