I have found widespread agreement among governmental and organizational
executives that their current state is more a product of what their organizations
did in the past than a product of what was done to them. Therefore, our future
state will be more a product of what we do now than of what is done to us.
If we don't know what state we would be in right now if we could be in whatever
state we wanted, how can we possibly know in what state we would like to be in
the future? Furthermore, statements of where we want to be in the future are
usually based on forecasts of what the future will be. Such forecasts are
inevitably wrong; we cannot identify all the significant changes that will occur in
our environments between now and then. It is for this reason that so many plans
are never completely implemented; they are dropped when it becomes apparent