Pre‐empting disaster

Those management trainers who have made serious attempts to apply Post‐Course Action Planning (1) to their course participants may have found that they run into difficulties in trying to persuade people to plan for the future — particularly for their own future within an organisation — and to take positive action in accordance with such plans. These difficulties frequently arise because people feel powerless and have an awful dread that something terrible will happen to them if they start “interfering with authority”. Indeed, it seems that many junior managers or supervisors, and their subordinates, go through their working lives mesmerised by the fear of some cataclysmic event which may be looming over them the whole time: such as redundancy, demotion, or the sack. They feel that it is not their job to question, still less to avert, this inevitable doom which lies in store for them. So they are content to spend their working lives adopting as low a profile as possible, hoping that thereby disaster will pass them by. Personal action planning is just not their cup of tea.