Reflections on planning: The value of uncertainty

Abstract

I have been involved lately in a committee which is thinking about planning for my university, so I have been forced to think about planning myself. Planning is a good or a bad word depending to a considerable degree, I suspect, on whether one is doing the planning or whether one is being planned. My reflections on the subject have taken the form of twelve rather haphazard propositions, none of which I put forward as being necessarily true, but which are perhaps plausible enough to be worth investigating.