CARLOS MATUS: SITUATIONAL STRATEGIC PLANNING - SSP


Plan is the momentaneous output of the process through which a player selects a chain of actions to achieve his or her goals.  In its most generic sense one can refer to a plan of action as something unavoidable in human practice, the only alternative to which is de command of improvisation.

Therefore, this generic concept of plan does not depend upon its pertinence to a given economic and social system, but upon the use of techno-political reason in the decision-making process.  There always is, though, the risk of confusing this process with a calculation determined by precise scientific laws, based upon an objective diagnosis of reality.

In real life, plan is surrounded by uncertainty, inaccuracy, surprise, rejection and support by other players.  Consequently, its calculation is hazy and based upon the understanding of the situation, that is, reality analyzed from the particular perspective of those who plan.  Eventually this plan leads to action, so that, in order to quote John Friedman: one can say that plan is mediation between knowledge and reason. Such mediation, however, does not occur through a simple relation between reality and sciences, for the knowledge of the former goes beyond the tradition scope of the latter.

Man, faced with a situation, struggles between the two extremes.  On one of them he or she totally controls the outcomes of his or her practice.  On the other one, he or she challenges or submits to processes in which the player is carried away by circumstances beyond his or her control.  In the first case the player decides on, acts and knows beforehand the achievable goals; in the second case, the player decides on nothing, he or she can but bet on the future and accept fate.  The player is a beholder of the world that determines his or her course of action, a world the player cannot change, but only judge and criticize this reality, or thank for and regret his or her fate.

Even in the border zone of the later case, though, history shows us leaders who challenge the impossible, under the most adverse conditions.  In this theoretical extreme, plan is submitted to the maximum proof of its effectiveness.  If it cannot be powerful in adversity and yields to improvisation, with much more grounds the latter will displace the former under favorable conditions.

Real rulers, as conductors of situations remain between the two extremes.  The balance among the variables they control and the ones they fail to control defines their governability on the object of plan.

The governability of man over reality indicates precisely towards which of the theoretical extremes the situation tends.  The ruler may decide as to the variables he or she controls, but is often unable to ensure outcomes, for they depend upon a part of the world out of the ruler’s control.

This difficulty does not discourage man’s intent to rule reality through bets that, with some basis of calculation, lead man to announce the outcomes of his action.  Politics require commitments that are expressed as announcements of outcomes.

A plan is a commitment that announces outcomes, although such outcomes do not fully or mainly depend upon the fulfillment of those commitments.

The bases for the bets of a ruler are all the more solid the greater is the weight of the variables such ruler controls vis-à-vis those he does not control, and all the more feeble if the variables controlled by the ruler are few and of lesser weight.  In another extreme of absolute control, the bet becomes certainty as to the outcomes.  In yet another one, of absolute lack of control, the bet is a matter of good or bad luck.

The process of government dwells in an intermediary zone between absolute certainty and sheer luck. Consequently, the theory of government is not one of deterministic control by the ruler over a system, nor the theory of a mere gamble, but it contains doses of both elements.


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