Adventure of Strategy

Here's a great little tale courtesy of Shawn Callahan "down under" at Anecdote, in Australia, about some R E A L L Y long range planning:

New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top. These might be two feet square and forty-five feet long.

A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because they had no idea where they would get beams of that calibre nowadays.

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some oak on College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked about oaks. And he pulled his forelock and said, "Well sirs, we was wonderin' when you'd be askin'."

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks has been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. "You don't cut them oaks. Them's for the College Hall."

In this age of quarterly earnings, annually distributed profits and deliberately engineered redundancy, reading about foresight such as that is truly a breath of fresh air!

Thanks for sharing such a nice article. After reading the article, I am reminded that planning is a crucial part of life as it makes living easier. Being able to prepare for a long term goal makes us feel prepared and more confident in the tasks ahead.

This story can be found in Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" both the text and the BBC TV's adaptation.