[shnu]

I agree with DavidC that this post has a rather different tone than other of his posts; that said, I am all in favour of Steve varying his style, and indeed, despite the slightly brutal tone, this is one of my favourite posts.

There's one factor that seems to be missing from the six-point analysis that is surely indispensible in military planning, and is also clearly relevant to personal effectiveness, namely command effectiveness, or one's fitness to execute a plan. For the military, situational training and morale will be among the crucial factors here; for personal effectiveness, goal-orientedness and tendency to procrastinate. I find it hard to credit that the military make their plans using analytical tools that do not explicitly account for such factors; certainly medical planning for catastrophes does.

Just to avoid risk of misunderstanding, indeed one can sort of account for these issues under the accessibility, vulnerability and recognizability factors, and indeed Steve says of recognizability "Is your project crystal clear or totally fuzzy?". I'd say, though, that this weakness makes the tool less "simple and effective" than it should be.

I am, however, motivated to try to rework this tool; I am very happy to have read and thought about Steve's take on CARVER. I'd be very interested to learn more about the original military planning tool that it is based on. Is there a reference?