You can agree with the idea that you need to know your goal and still be bad at figuring out what the goal is for any given piece of communication. I'm sure of this because I see people communicate with each other in absence of a clear goal all the time, in business and in life.

Every time you communicate—big multimedia campaigns to short text messages—you have a goal and the clearer you are about the goal, the easier it becomes to hit the mark. We need to understand why we are communicating and what we are trying to achieve before we decide anything else.

Do think of plans and structures as leashes or straight jackets: something that keeps you confined? I used to, too. See how they can actually create the freedom to be creative and have fun, with the brilliant side effect of doing better work.