I'm somewhat bemused by the direction this thread's taking. It started off with the promise of a certain fecundity, that it would lead to an interesting exchange of MOs whereas, to my disappointment, it seems to me to have drifted into that no-mans land just this side of attacksville.
To make my own position crystal clear:
a. when I was working, it was pretty much always a matter of making the best of the situation with which I found myself presented. Sometimes I had choice of model or location and sometimes not; when my instincts were frustrated like that, I just did my best to produce as good a technical end result as I was capable of producing - I didn't want to lose clients and I needed the work. My head was seldom filled with preconceived notions of what the images were going to look like: I simply winged the whole thing. To my joy, many years later, I listened to a David Bailey interview where he was asked if he planned his portaits well in advance. He said no, never; he just spent an hour or so chatting, and that gave him an inkling of how the subject might function. He went on to say that were he to pre-plan, he'd just hand the job over to somebody else to shoot for him. I know exactly what he meant;
b. now that I'm not working, I continue in the manner to which I've always been accustomed to work: I wing it. Totally. Digital makes that oh, so very easy and safe. The thought of having a shooting plan would cross my mind once or twice, in my early days of retirement, and almost always meant that I came home without making a single shot - not one exposure. Which in film days, was a brilliant piece of fiscal self-censorship! Today, I eshew plans of any sort - not just photographic ones. So the very idea of setting out at some time during the day intent on doing x, y or zee is absolutely alien to me.
When I do make a click, it's because something has appealed to me, and I feel I'd like to look at it again and, with luck, transform it into something more than itself. That's the second huge plus of digital for me: I can start with the probably mundane, and sometimes turn that around into an interesting (to me) picture after the event. But hey, Adams did no less. On some rare - very rare - occasions I will find a caption come into my head, right out of the blue, and then find something that sort of fits. But by the time I've finished with the thing, the caption probably vanishes into that deep pit of good intentions.
So there it is: I shoot without a plan, guided only by an instinct which, maybe, can be called an eye or, perhaps, luck, depending on how charitable one feels.