There was an interesting kind of thought process that I… that I learned in the navy as well, that I… that I found very… I found very valuable, particularly when I was doing fieldwork later on. In… in the military there is… there’s a lot of built-in redundancy. For example, when you are on the bridge and you have to communicate with the helmsman and, well there were like five methods, even in those primitive 50 years ago, days of… 50… much more primitive equipment: you had a speaking tube, you had a sound-powered telephone, you had an actual electric telephone, you had an engine room telegraph, you had a courier you could send somebody down to give messages, so there were all these kinds of standby things. And also there was a lot of planning beforehand. So if you, for example, if you had were going to go someplace you had to plot the route; you had a pretty good idea where you were going, it wasn't ad hoc, you know, and you… you would also think of alternatives. So you would have plan A, plan B, plan C, with a automatic transition. You know if things didn't go on plan A, plan B was all ready. Now one thing I learned later on is making plans is extremely important. Following the plans is much less important. You always... this wasn't quite true when you were handling a ship, but… but it is true with in other endeavors. You want to have a really well formulated, well designed plan, but know you're not going to follow it exactly. And if opportunities come up, things that you could possibly, not possibly have anticipated at the start, you have to be ready to diverge from the plan. By the way, one of the problems with things like, you know, tactical planning and business plans, they have a lot of… they have real inherent disadvantages because that means that if something, an opportunity arises, and you've got a business plan or… or, you know, organizational plan, you say, oh no, we can't do that because we have a plan. And it's… it’s very good to kind of have plans with the expectation you're not going to follow them. And that… that certainly was very helpful in my medical, in my scientific research. We… we had very rigorous plan formulation, but we knew darned well we weren't going to follow it. When something came up we hadn't anticipated, we sort of expected that in a sense. But planning was essential.
