Arnold Kling describes The Planning Illusion:
When something goes wrong, there is a natural desire to blame a lack of planning. In fact, with hindsight, it is always possible to come up with a plan that would have worked better. I would refer to this as the planning illusion. This illusion causes a number of problems.First, the planning illusion leads to the syndrome known as ‘planning for the last war.’ Organizations develop a set of operating strategies that are based on theories that are outdated, or just completely misguided.
Second, faith in planning causes organizations to become overly centralized. Information from peripheral sources is ignored. Flexibility for field-level decisionmaking is denied.
Finally, faith in planning leads people to believe that government has a solution for every problem. In many cases, better approaches emerge from decentralized improvisations.
Large organizations plan. Small organizations improvise:
My reading of FEMA, the Federal agency currently blamed for the awful scenes in New Orleans, is that up until very recently, it acted as a sort of insurance adjuster. FEMA officials would arrive days or weeks after a disaster, assess damages, and help process funds for compensating victims. This may or may not have been the mission in theory, but it appears to be the way that FEMA operated in practice.Now, the public appears to expect FEMA to operate as a sort of domestic Green Beret outfit, able to parachute in to a crisis area and solve humanitarian and engineering problems in real time. In theory, such an organization would be highly valuable. In practice, it strikes me as implausible that FEMA would turn out to be that organization.