Don Michael: one of planning’s pioneering learners

Citation

Millett, S.M. (2010), "Don Michael: one of planning’s pioneering learners", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 38 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2010.26138fae.001

Don Michael: one of planning’s pioneering learners

Article Type: The strategist’s bookshelf From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 38, Issue 6

In Search of the Missing Elephant: Selected EssaysDonald N. Michael, with an introduction by Graham Leicester (Triarchy Press, 2010).

Ten years after his death, Don Michael is seldom credited for his pioneering work in the psychology of planning, though many of his associates fondly recall energizing conversations they had with him. Perhaps this small volume of his essays resurrected by the International Futures Forum in Scotland will help to restore Michael’s reputation for his contributions to the art of planning. Although these essays span 1973 to 2000, many of the points that Michael made over those three decades are highly relevant today.

Michael earned degrees in physics and in psychology from Harvard and Chicago. He worked during the early Cold War as a defense engineer, futurist, and planner for the Pentagon. When he shifted careers in 1967 to teaching at the University of Michigan, he produced his seminal book, On Learning to Plan – And Planning to Learn (1973). The title captures his major thesis, and these newly reprinted essays remind us of it long after Michael’s obscure book went out of print.

Michael struggled with an intellectual dilemma still puzzling today: on the one hand, he argued for the importance of long-term purposeful planning as opposed to wasteful trial and error, but on the other hand he dismissed typical plans as potentially misleading and perhaps even intellectually dishonest. He rejected the idea that one can “know,” let alone “predict,” the future. He recognized that we are all captive of the same environment that we are trying to describe, so none of us is ever truly objective in either science or planning due to our own interests and biases. His take on the famous parable of the blind men trying to describe the elephant by feeling its parts – there is no “elephant” – there are only people struggling to learn about reality, as they perceive it.

The solution to Michael’s quandary is that planning is a continuous process of framing expectations and intensions for the future and then using that same process to learn how to plan better as we go along. To describe this approach, he used the term “the learning organization” before Peter M. Senge popularized the concept in his highly successful book The Fifth Discipline (1990). Michael wrote that “planning becomes the pedagogy for social learning.” He argued that there was no existing theory of social change in a highly dynamic world, so planning would take the place of laboratory experiments as the method of investigation. Michael was very pessimistic about the state of knowledge of social systems, to the point that he proclaimed that nobody, including himself, really knew what they were talking about. Yet he was remarkably optimistic that people had the capacity to learn and to evolve to higher levels of knowledge through experience, humility, and adaptation.

When Michael retired from the University of Michigan, he relocated to San Francisco, where he continued to think and write about forecasting and planning. He associated himself with GBN and participated in early scenario projects. He liked scenarios because they told stories and provoked unconventional thinking, leading to learning experiences of great potential value in the future.

Why would the writings of Michael interest the business manager today? His observations then, based largely on his experiences in the public sector, remain valid in both the public and private sectors. Planning is vital for making decisions today about investments in plants, equipment, technologies, new products, intellectual property and people that require years to recoup in the future. But plans are not contracts; they are guidelines to everyday actions. Planning puts strategies into action. In the face of great uncertainties today during the Great Recession and the Big Spill, managers need to recall Michael’s advice to pursue strategy as “tentative commitment,” which is the self-acknowledgement of the limits of current knowledge and perceptions and the willingness to undertake reasonable endeavors with the resolution to make changes as circumstances dictate. Be prepared to take risks, some of which will be mistakes, and learn from them! Have the courage to be adaptive, to recognize mistakes, and to move on with further conviction.

I never knew Michael, but I know a man who was a student of his at Michigan who has told me much about him. My friend tells me that Michael said that by the time he had finished writing On Learning to Plan he felt that he finally knew enough about planning to write a book about it. In his approach to life he practiced the same humility that he advocated for others.

Stephen M. MillettPresident of Futuring Associates LLC, located in Columbus, Ohio (smillett@futuringassociates.com). He is a Contributing Editor of Strategy & Leadership.