do we need plans ?

While watching "Dan in Real Life" today and i came across a dialog that made me think. It was : "We ask our children what plans do you have in life ? Instead we should tell them to plan to get surprised".
The meaning is simple. No matter how much you plan for no matter how many contingencies, there will always be something that will go wrong. That is perhaps the only rule in life that never fails. This simply implies that we should follow the path that life throws at us, because planning can only help us in giving a goal. It can never achieve it for us.

Plans are like shotguns, you point them in roughly the right direction they will give you returns. That is as far as it goes. After that its your own skill, determination and of course luck that will help you attain your dreams. Now some of you will say that i am leaving my life in the hands of fate. While partly true that is not the truth. Each one of us has a predefined personality trait. So, we are destined to do something in life that is unique to us. We can deviate from that something in two ways : inaction and too much action.

By inaction i mean completely leaving your life in fate's hands. Never taking a decision and considering every problem you face God's decision and thereby declining to fight. This way we will never achieve our destiny after all "God helps those who helps themselves."

Too much action refers to planning overly. This is perhaps the most widespread reason of failure. A lot of us spend a lot of time in planning. We try to make sure that we do not fail. But still we do. Why ? We fail because we lay so much emphasis on our plans that we forget who and what we are. We tend to make those plans inflexible so that later on we trust in them blindly and fail to take heed of our instincts and intellect.

We can form a committee and make plans for our future, or in the case of a team, the organisation's future. You may spend an hour, a month or even a year in planning but you cannot achieve your goal unless you have the skill and determination to succeed. For an individual these skills may be technical, conversational or intellectual. For a team the most important skills would be teamwork. In a team, the skills of individuals also matter and so does the chemistry between the various members of a team. It is well documented that if there are differences among the members of a team, the performance of the whole team goes down.

What i mean is that rather than waste time on planning, we should take action. Sure, planning is necessary but only upto a certain level. After that level, it becomes a liability instead of an advantage and the advantages of our skills become superficial as we tend to depend too much on the plans to solve our problems rather than our skills. We become so dependent on following the plans that we forget that it was us who made the plans and so we have the power to change them as well to suit our current needs.