 Johnny is an excellent bowler, and his dad owns the local alley. He can practice all he wants. He was up against a good bowler in the tournament, but he knew he was a little better than his competition, and his dad made sure he had the most consistent lane in the building. He was up six points going into the ninth frame when it happened. He was on his approach, right on target. When the bug landed on his left eyebrow totally distracting him, it was a gutter ball. There's no way to recover from that. It doesn't matter how good your rules are, reality is not going to follow them. Reality does not honor authority recognized by men, nor does it even obey the soundest laws. Reality just is. What that means is that Johnny might beat the other fellow 98% of the time, but there will always be the 2% where something unplanned happens and changes the whole playing field. We plan the best we can with the knowledge we have that is both practical and reasonable. This is the purpose of science, to give us the best ability to predict what is going to happen when we do things. We even build bridges with safety factors knowing that there are going to be challenges that we could not foresee. We do have some general rules for handling tasks. You build a bridge to handle three or four times the heaviest load it is expected to handle. You build it to withstand a hurricane and flood. Then it is expected to serve until the utterly unexpected occurs, until a riverboat captain suffers a heart attack and his massive barge strikes one of the bridge supports. One general rule for planning is expect anything you plan to cost twice as much as you could predict that it should cost. And plan it take twice as long as it seems reasonable when you look at what has to be done. These generally seem to work as planning rules. There is no science that can say why such rules work, but application is practical. Such planning helps us see what to expect in performance matters when reality refuses to follow the rules and laws we think it should follow. Engineers consider something that will happen 95 out of 100 times to be reasonably certain. When they design a bridge to last 100 years, they will generally design it to withstand the highest flood expected, with 95% certainty, to occur within that period of time and to withstand the worst storm that is expected to hit within that time. For day-to-day use, the statistics are not that important. What is important is realization of chaos. Chaos is real. We can do all the planning we want, and it will not have any effect on reality. There will still be a chance of things going wrong. No matter how good our planning, there is still a chance that it will fail. This is not meant as discouragement. It is a statement of planning itself, that the planning has value, but not certainty. It is a statement that results will not always be forthcoming from actions taken. A failure to gain the desired result on the first try is not an ultimate witness to failure. It is simply the reality experienced. It is only those things that seem to fail with regularity that should be accepted as problems to solve. Johnny could not reasonably have planned for corrective action when a bug landed on his face, nor when an earthquake hit, nor when a meteor from space hit the bowling alley during his approach. Such things are chaos. They cannot be reasonably planned. The general performance rule is that you plan what you can and leave the reasonable amount of leeway for what cannot be planned. There is going to be chaos. If there is time, it will be encountered. If you need half an hour to do homework, plan an hour, and it will generally give time even with interruptions and distractions of living. If you need to turn in some assignment and have eight working hours to work on it, plan to have it completed in four hours, and it will normally be done in spite of the delays and interferences that life always seems to provide. Keep in mind this will work for you about 95 out of 100 times. The remaining five will not get done in time to turn the homework in for credit. Adults may not always know the principles of planning, but they have learned to live in the same world, and they experience the same level of chaos. This is what makes adults tolerant of us not getting everything done on time and right the first time through. The purpose of this presentation is to make you consciously aware of both the chaos of reality and the requirement and limits that this places upon us. Being aware of these, your capacity for planning is increased, and your potential for effectiveness is increased as well.