An old joke goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. In social care we're good at planning: business meetings, CPAs, risk assessments, reviews, professionals meetings, team plans - you name it, we plan it. God's sides must be aching.
Having specific targets can be pointless and even damaging when you're dealing with individual lives. For instance, I've stopped putting a number to the people we hope to move on in the coming year. Events in people's lives tend to get in the way and screw it all up. That would be entirely permissible if it wasn't for the conflict posed between achieving your target and still convincing yourself that it remains in John's best interests to move on, within the target period, despite the fact he's changed his mind and his voices are getting worse than ever. Targets or people? Of course, it goes without saying that it has to be the latter every time. So, in which case, why bother with the targets in the first place?
Plans and targets come from the world of business. A world we sometimes appear to be too much in awe of. We seem to have a sneaking dread that all this social care stuff may be fluffy nonsense and we need to get more business-like.
Life is based on uncertainty. Creating plans help to create an illusion of control. Integral to planning is predicting future events. Such predictions inform our plans through the application of inductive logic, that is, using past experience to support the probability of future experience.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us of the pitfalls of empirical evidence in his book Black Swan. For hundreds of years people believed that all swans were white; the colour helped to define the bird - until the discovery of Australia and the black swan. One single observation invalidated a general observation confirmed by one thousand years of empirical knowledge. Many important events in history were not predicted - the Holocaust, 9/11, the impact of the internet and now the banking crisis. So much for the business world.
So would economists and planners be better off with a pack of Tarot cards? Probably not. Short-term planning remains important despite its vulnerability to the black swan. After all, there'll be a day when I won't see the tomorrow. But it's part of my nature to assume that I'll be here to enjoy the next sunrise.
Nigel Leaney manages a mental health residential service
Published in the 19 June edition of Community Care under the headline Lessons of the Black Swan
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