execution of your plan.
Contingency planning, if allowed to
overwhelm your thinking, can paralyze
your progress toward a goal. You spend
so much effort worrying about what might
happen that you have no time left to make
anything happen. Conversely, if you plan
too rigidly and with too much optimism
that everything will work out perfectly,
you are likely to fail because of some
little glitch that brings the whole process
to a halt.
That balance is the tricky part of the
planning process, whether that plan is
creating a new model to fly or planning
the future of a 70-year-old organization.
Tomorrow is going to be interesting.
I saw a quote the other day, which I
cannot attribute to an author, that was
applicable as the AMA Executive Council
embarks on creating/refining a strategic
plan: “It is much easier to develop new
ideas than it is to escape the old ones.”
Til next month. MA
s I write this, the AMA
Executive Council is about to
begin a two-day Strategic
Planning session.
With my mind on that, a subject for
this column was hard to produce—that is
until I had a conversation with a friend
concerning strategic planning. He used
the phrase, “planning to make the future
happen.” At first, this seemed a curious
grouping of words, but the more I thought
about it, I realized that it had many
applications in life and in aeromodeling.
When you think about it, nearly
everything we do in regards to our hobby
is a matter of making the future happen.
How well we plan and the way we
execute that plan will have a big shortterm
and long-term effect on our future.
Each step in the process we go
through when acquiring a new model has
the future in mind, and each step is
important in determining our activity in
the future. Whether we are buying an
ARF or scratch-building a masterpiece,
we are planning to fly that model at some
time, and each step of the process will
have an effect on what happens.
How long before the future “happens”
can be a short time or an extremely long
time, depending on what we are doing.
President’s Perspective
AMA President Dave Brown
A
Properly executing well-thought-out plans
can create a long, wonderful future of
enjoyment of that model; hasty, illconceived
actions can have disastrous
results immediately or sometime in the
future.
I suppose the same can be said for the
sport/hobby we all love so deeply.
Making good plans and executing those
plans well will have an enormous effect
on what happens later.
We cannot absolutely control our
future with planning because there is a
certain level of the unknown, which
makes our lives worth living. The plans
we develop can—and should—include
flexibility and contingencies for those
elements we cannot predict or control.
It may be easier to build that fuel tank
into the model permanently, but if the fuel
line inside the tank fails, it will mean the
demise of the airplane. Extra planning to
make the tank removable could save the
model in the future. Careful planning with
an eye toward contingencies can increase
the likelihood that the future will be as we
would like it to be.
Organizational planning isn’t much
different. No matter how well you plan,
there will always be situations that were
not considered during your planning
process. It becomes a balancing act
between addressing those items that
directly move you toward your goal and
directing your efforts toward correcting
problems that are bound to surface in the
Dave Brown
AMA president
[email protected]
It is much easier to develop new ideas
than it is to escape the old ones.
September 2006 5
M i s s i o n S t a t e m e n t
The Academy of Model Aeronautics is a world-class association of modelers organized for the purpose of
promotion, development, education, advancement and safeguard modeling activities.
The Academy provides leadership, organization, competition, communication, protection, representation,
recognition, education, and scientific/technical development to modelers.
09sig1.QXD 7/25/06 11:51 AM Page 5
Edition: Model Aviation - 2006/09
Page Numbers: 5