personal job-enhancing concerns uppermost in mind, a first objective (not helpful,
yet understandable) being to promote themselves in their organization’s and or
also their profession’s pecking order.
Clearly, it is an advantage to have an understanding of the means for attaining
the ‘targets’ and ‘goals’ profiled in a mission statement, expressed in terms of the
operational theory involved. Conversely a lack of understanding of mission goals
induces the sense of frustration, aimlessness and under-achievement which, sadly,
is the hallmark of many planners’ work experience. The consideration here is with
the delivery components of neomodern work-around practice. Healey et al. (1995
paraphrasing Faludi) have it that ‘The purpose of plans is to provide, in one way
or another, a store of decision rules to guide a subsequent stream of regulatory and
investment decisions’ and figure 2.3 lists the ‘outcomes’, ‘characteristics’ and ‘tech-
nological’ bases of both traditional and radical planning. This connects with two
items presented earlier in this chapter: the complexity and confusion of the 30-plus
listing of theory nomenclature (figure 2.2); and the box 2.1 format depicting how
the horticulturalist, the orchardist and the forester usually have the problem of
improper land usage sorted out for them via best-use zoning, yet could have
obtained improved production and enjoyment from their landholdings by engag-
ing either the ‘cooperative’ or the ‘reapportioning’ options (C or D).
There are some approaches which fit neither the traditional-lineal nor the radical-
multiplex reasoning. Here I have in mind the likes of the ‘action’, ‘adversary’,
‘advocacy’, ‘target’ and ‘incrementalist’ modes, each with its devotees and a liter-
ature. The case against their lack of fit rests fundamentally with the litmus test of
ability/inability for procedures of these kinds to nest recognizably within a multi-
ple-belief system and or also to fit with the sustainable, conservation withdevel-
opment, reasoning. These distinctions are of particular importance in relation to
operatives who wish to present themselves as ‘radical’ but who, if solely critical,
vituperative or disruptive for no achievable purpose, are really ‘out of the planning
loop’ and really not part of a multiple-belief neomodern operational system.Figure 2.4 showing the ‘SWOT’ progressionillustrates sequential theory in a
semi-scientific way (with ‘prognosis’ and ‘implementation’ laced in) combining
the fundamental working components of alloperationally effective traditional-
lineal and radical-multiplex planning processes. An element of ‘sleight of hand’
is glossed over with the SWOT approach (sometimes styled SWOP – Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, Problems) because of the glib way it proceeds
‘magically’ from potentials identification and problems detection to plans – a
design-step mystery which will be addressed later.
Additional to the problem-solving and the potential-realizing distinctions
within planning practice, there exists another significant operational distinction:
between a formulaic legal-rules activity, and plan-led design actions. All people
involved in mitigating, assessing, dealing, appealing, negotiating or ameliorating
are, of course, implicated in planning issues; yet they may be remote from actu-
ally ‘doing or delivering’ planned change. Operatives of a process-directed per-
suasion find it easy to construe that, surely, their activity predicates the delivery
of planning, even if daily practice has them in the environmental courts or at the52 Principles