Good Planning is a non-event: the problem anticipated, the pitfall avoided. Yet we do so love our tools. Say Project Planning and people immediately think Bar Charts and Network Diagrams.

A tool has no intrinsic merit. A tool is but a tool, what matters is what we do with it.

(My word processor recommends I substitute “disappointing” for “non-event” – so much for smart tools!)

In 1978, I was responsible for planning the construction of a billion dollar desalination and power plant in Saudi Arabia. I started my work at the construction company’s head office in London. The engineering, drawing, purchasing and manufacturing scope of work was taking place not only in the UK but also at major suppliers and partners in Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA. When the project moved into the construction phase, I moved to Jeddah where the plant was being built.

We set up a “war room” on site with network diagrams and bar charts pinned around the walls, artist’s impressions of the finished buildings and even a scale model of the whole plant showing the mechanical equipment, pipe bridges, and cable runs.

Every week we held a planning meeting in the war room. This lasted most of the day and systematically reviewed progress in each area and on each system. This was the opportunity for civil, mechanical, electrical, instrument and commissioning teams to resolve the sequence and priority of work at critical interfaces: where the big cooling water pipes went under the road, how the pipe bridge cut off crane access to the transformer bays, when the continuously-cast chimneys would get precedence on the concrete batching plant.

Dramas of goods lost in transit, failed machinery, even sudden death from heatstroke unfolded, were discussed and consequent problems resolved in this theatre. The meeting was structured so that people need only attend the part that affected them.

The Project Manager chaired the planning meeting. I set the agenda and took the minutes, aiming to have them typed and circulated the same day. On the rare occasions when we couldn’t be there, the meeting went ahead without us. It wasn’t the Project Manger’s meeting or my meeting. It was everybody’s meeting; they needed it to do their job. If they couldn’t talk about their problems, they wouldn’t be able to solve them.

Civil construction (and especially the marine work) was a challenge on this project. Situated on the Red Sea coast, the porous ground consisted of compacted rock and coral. The construction of a quay was a particular concern. We were building this to offload the big roll-on roll-off (RO-RO) vessels that were bringing our six-hundred-ton evaporators from Japan.

A desalination plant is basically a huge kettle to distil fresh water from seawater or rather a series of such kettles. On our project, there were sixty evaporators, fabricated in a Japanese shipyard and shipped to us twelve at a time. These would to be brought ashore by a massive flatbed trailer.

When the first shipment was already on its way, it became clear that the quay was not going to be ready on time. The quay was built of pre-cast slabs resting on forty piles drilled into a shore that sloped rapidly to depths of a hundred feet. Drilling the piles was immensely difficult because the granite boulders that were embedded in the coral could easily deflect the drills.

We drew up a bar chart to monitor progress and posted it on the war-room wall. This detailed each step of the process: drilling the hole, inserting the steel liner, fitting reinforcement, pouring the concrete and moving the piling rig to the next position. The piles were all numbered but it was hard to relate the bars on this chart to the piles on the shore, so we put up a plan of the ship-offloading quay and colored-in the circles as each pile was completed.

It was easy to see that we were slipping behind but unclear what we could do to retrieve the delay. Therefore, we drew another chart that plotted the number of piles completed cumulatively against a time scale and showed the target: forty piles before the ship arrived.

It was obvious that we would have to double our drilling rate to get the quay ready in time. This was impossible. The existing crew was already working twenty-four hours a day in shifts, and we could not hire another piling contractor as the work demanded specialized equipment that would never get to Jeddah in time.

When we hit real problems on site, our Lebanese owners would don their traditional Arab costumes (“thawb”, “ghutra” and “igaal”: the ankle length cotton shirt; red diagonally-folded headdress; and double-coiled cord circlet that holds it in place), and request a meeting with the Saudi client in the war room.

We were quite open, we told the client that we were having a problem with the ship-offloading quay and that we did not know what to do about it. What did they think?

By now, we had pinned up a photograph of the roll-on roll-off vessel and, to complete the picture, a diagram of the stowage of the evaporators on its deck. We had created what the redoubtable Edward Tufte ("the Leonardo da Vinci of data") calls a visual confection “juxtapositions from the oceans of the streams of story”.

Someone noticed that the evaporators were arranged in two rows of six along the length of the ship and asked the question “couldn’t we focus on completing a quay of just half the width, moor the ship to roll the evaporators off on one side, re-anchor the ship and roll the evaporators off on the other side?” Therefore, this is what we did. By the time the second shipment arrived the whole quay was complete.

Our Saudi clients were delighted to have been invited to discuss the problem and thrilled to feel that they had contributed to its solution.

Summarizing and confirming your understanding of a situation are vital steps in creating understanding. Displaying this understanding in a graphical form is a further stride in helping people spot patterns and find solutions.

Good planning is not about command and control, not about speaking truth to power, not about owning up or covering up, not about saying you know when you don’t know. And it is most certainly not about the tools you use.

Good planning is about coordination and cultivation, about dialogue, about a conversation with a centre and no sides, about making sense together.