As opposed to a guess based on ignorance. Nobody is arguing for ignorance. That's not an argument made in either the original post or in mine. The thesis is th

As opposed to a guess based on ignorance. Nobody is arguing for ignorance. That's not an argument made in either the original post or in mine. The thesis is that what people call planning is usually guessing and should be treated as such, not that making informed decisions is bad, not that guessing is bad, and not that planning is bad. You say planning is preparation, but preparation for what? You are necessarily making predictions about what will happen in the future and what the appropriate course of action will be. The ideas are inseparable. Again: not that this is bad, but it is still guesswork--still map, not territory--and should be de-emphasized relative to dealing with the territory itself. How much you devote to it depends on the costs associated with speculating on a course of action. Is this time spent planning going to save more time of work? Are the consequences of these possible situations worth the effort expended to prepare for them? If you're (say) coordinating hundreds of thousands of people to invade Europe, the cost of speculating and preparing is dwarfed by the cost of changing course to react to new developments. On the other end, especially when it's an individual or a small business, sometimes the cost of speculating on a course of action is higher than the cost of just putting it into practice.