When things go right

There is an old debate amongst business people about how to best run a business. One side claims that detailed planning, accounting for every variable and contingency, thorough documentation of the environment, industry, market and company with sales plans that flow into budgets, etc is the way to go. The other side maintains that execution is the primary focus. This theory is that all the planning in the world will not foresee all the things that the environment, industry market, government etc will throw at you so worry about and focus on execution. There is plenty of evidence for each side of this argument.
We hosted about 23 friends and family the past 2 weeks at our wedding. We had the church and reception places reserved and took care of a few hotel arrangements. Most of the guests stayed at our home and took public transportation to various tourist venues and meals not at home over a long weekend.
Here is the rub, planning requires consensus and agreement. Planning for a dinner out would require a massive amount of consensus building on an issue that most everyone can be easily satisfied. That goes for tourist venues too. So on the lead up to the visits; I was a proponent of minimal plans. My soon to be wife on the other hand needed plans in place. We abstractly had a plan to use public transportation or taxi to get everywhere (no too easy with 23 bodies), debated over restaurants and tourist venues and guessed at attendance levels of each. My spouse had the one meal she needed catered at the house arranged, the rest were trips to the supermarket. She tortured herself with the fear of delegating some kitchen duty to guests, where I was confident no one in my family would think twice about going into my refrigerator and using my stove, toaster, coffee maker or whatever.
Somehow, and I don’t know how, everything went alright. The plans were minimal with not hard set itinerary but a general; this is what we will do when (except the wedding and reception). We managed to more than survive, deliver a very enjoyable weekend in Prague for everyone who came.
I can only assume that opposites really do attract and that the debate over planning and execution gets no contribution from our wedding. But it is sure nice when things go right.