Success-Oriented Planning
This phrase appears in an article by Gregg Easterbrook from the unfathomably distant 1980, describing the financial disasters of the Space Shuttle program even before the first shuttle had taken off.
As it turns out, NASA’s concept of “success-oriented planning” needed a little tweaking to be useful in the real world:
But NASA had made its $5 billion to $6 billion projection based on “success-oriented planning.” That means it assumed everything would work the first time. Budgets were drawn as if redesigns would never be needed, as if no contingencies would arise, as if 520-second engine tests could be conducted with 300-second tanks.
Of course, NASA planners knew everything would not work the first time.
When a phrase sounds like gobbledygook, it probably is gobbledygook.
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