Goals, Planning, and Plans
Once people recognize their goals, they take the next step in the goal—plan—action sequence (Dillard, 1990a)—creating plans that will direct people to engage in the actions necessary to achieve their goals.
Without planning and plans, people are poorly equipped to pursue and achieve their goals. People often do not have a clear focus on what they want, so they act without thinking and lack the flexibility provided by initial and alternative plans. People plan proactive goals in advance, and so they refine their goals and how they will strategically approach other people. However, reactive goals tend to take people by surprise (Canary, Cunningham, & Cody, 1988; Sillars & Weisberg, 1987) when they are confronted and have little or no time to plan behavior to achieve or retain their goals (Cody et al., 1994).Waldron (1997) explains three types of planning that are conceptually similar to the idea of proactive and reactive goals. Pre-conversational planning establishes plans before the interaction occurs. Conversely, conversational planning represents how the plans are used during an interaction or real-time planning of the moves during a conversation. Unlike the first two types, which focus on the individual, interactive planning considers planning as a process of mutual construction and coordination of plans.
People need to act if their plans are to mean something. Various external and internal forces influence whether to act (Pervin, 1989b). People might not always enact a goal—plan—action sequence successfully because ofseveral factors, including: other’s, conflicting goals they have, the characteristics of the situation, and/or lack of ability (Berger, 1997). When people do translate their plans into actions, goals and plans remain dynamic as you have experienced many times. Plans often do not work and so people need back-up plans or move to a different objective. As people pursue multiple goals simultaneously, their goals may change in strength, importance, and even content during the course of the interaction (Berger, 1997).