Unanswered Questions

My first thought seeing Saras' question was "Isn't what 'pivoting' is all about these days?" And it does seem to be the case. The fact that the knowing and pursuing of a goal is so fraught with challenges there is the Biblical thought about nations planning and God frustrating those plans, which got shortened to "Man plans. God laughs."

The point actually had come up in the planning literature in two modern places about 20 years apart. In the career planning lit, Osipow (Theories of career Development, around 1968) talked about his favorite model, an open-systems approach to career planning, in which having a goal (or not, he could accept either way), you start taking actions toward that goal and you are presented with additional choices. The further you go, the more choices you come across. You may take some of these choices which do not fit the original plan (or that actually let you leapfrog steps in your plan - again, he is very flexible in his thinking), which suggests learning more you might change/adapt your goal (shades of pivoting and leveraging or making do) or reinforce the original one.

About the same time, a similar idea was percolating in the mind of Entrepreneurship scholar Bob Ronstadt, then at Babson. He called his 1988 approach the "Corridor Principle." Imagine you're at the start of a corridor (and the corridor is defined by the goal you've imagined - which is arguably at the "end" of the corridor), and there are doors along both sides of the corridor. You can't see what's behind the door until you step up to it (and hence down the corridor), and once you look inside, you may decide to go down that path. Again, the goal may be the same, and this path a better one for your purposes, or it may be a path taking you to a variant of the original goal, or even to a new goal.

The point is that the pursuit of a goal (and the planning which backs it up) in the real world is recognized as something subject to change (else why would so many religions and states permit divorce?). That said, there is also a belief that some planning is useful, but the wise approach goes back to some variant of plan but be ready to change your plans.

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One of my nephews organized a round trip around the earth two years ago. This is a precise goal since he decided to start and arrive from / to Paris at given dates with a friend. They both pursue the objective of discovering how institutions dedicated to mental disabled people are related to cultural aspects (means-end hierarchy of H.A. Simon, 1997). They had a pre-list of identified potential institutions to visit in different countries. But, throughout different contacts, they added new institutions on their list.

In order to prepare their travel, Jean-Gabriel and his friend Adrien applied causal logic. For instance they planned to cross Africa riding a motor bike. When scheduling their overall trip, motor bikes should be ready to use and available when arriving on Africa ground (prediction). When they reached Africa, they adopted effectuation routines since they had to manage with high level of uncertainty: specific weather conditions, information delivered by local authorities preventing them to cross Al-Kaida patrols, taking into account their tiredness and discovery of new institutions to visit...

This example seems to show that effectuation routines can be encrypted into a large causation framework. But encryption of causation into effectuation routines seems not possible and according to me doesn’t make sense. What is your opinion?

Kind regards
Dominique

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