Ah, August 2020.
Cast your mind back to January.
Where did you think you’d be around this time of the year?
Life has a way of interfering with our plans.
Clearly then, this crisis shows that planning is impossible.
Actually, this crisis shows that we need planning more than ever.
Hi guys, welcome to Brain-Friendly Thinking.
If this is your first visit, on this channel I talk about how to come up with creative
ideas for your business, how to adapt to change and how to plan ahead in uncertain times.
A lot of people don’t like planning.
They view planning as a chore to be done before the real action can start.
Instead of planning, they want to go down to action.
And to justify their beliefs, they often say some variant of “no plan survives the first
contact with the enemy force”.
And really, if you look at Dwight D. Eisenhower who was in charge of the preparation and execution
of D-Day, he said “When preparing for battle I often found that plans are quite useless”.
“But” he continues, “but planning is essential”.
How is that possible?
Well, where can we start?
Before we talk about planning, it’s important that you know about OSINTOTs.
So sit back, relax, this is a true story that happened to a lecturer of mine, Steven Carver,
an amazing teacher.
Before he became a lecturer, he worked in oil industry, first as a project engineer
and then as a project manager.
When he was just new in his role as a project manager, his boss called him to his office
and said “What is the role of a project manager?”
And Steven, who had just finished his MBA, said “The role of a project manager is to
deliver a project on time, to budget and to specification.”
To which his boss replied “Bullshit!”
The role of a project manager is to hunt OSINTOTs.
OSINTOTs.
Sure.
Steven had just been through a whole MBA and he felt like “I must have missed that lesson.”
So his boss said “So you know what an OSINTOT is, right?”
“Oh yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, definitely…”
“Then tell me, Steven, how did you kill OSINTOTs?”
“With a pump gun?”
“No, Steven, we don’t want OSINTOTs running around half-wounded spilling blood everywhere.
You kill them with one nice shot from a quick hunting rifle.
And which OSINTOTs do you kill, Steven?”
“The adults?”
“No, you take the young ones.
Just when they peak out of their burrow for the first time, and they take their first
look at the mean, bad world out there, you take aim and you kill them with one clean
headshot.
Do you understand this?”
“Yeah, sure, sure, of course…”
“Good.
Oh, another thing.
If I ever find a full grown OSINTOT in one of your projects, I will kill you.”
So at that point Steven left the office and he ran into a more experienced colleague outside
and said “I just had the most bizarre talk ever.”
The experienced colleague started laughing and he said “So tell me, Steven, how do
you kill an OSINTOT?”
“Why, with a quick hunting rifle, we’ve just been through that.
But what’s an OSINTOT?”
It turned out that OSINTOT is an acronym for Oh Shit I Never Thought Of That.
So an important activity in project management as well as in life is finding and killing
OSINTOTs before they’re too big.
But how do you do this?
This is precisely where planning comes in.
How so?
If we think about a plan, we usually think of a list of action steps.
First A then B then C. But this is just one meaning of the term plan.
Here is another example of a plan.
This is the piping plan of an air brake as it was used on trains at the beginning of
the 20th century.
As you can see, it shows all the important elements of the piping, such as pumps, brake
valves, brake cylinders, gauges and how they are connected with one another.
Taking this piping plan, you can understand how this brake system works and importantly,
you can start to ask what-if questions.
What if the steam supply to the pump gets blocked?
What if the hose that connects the coaches, gets cut?
Using the piping plan, you can work out what happens and based on that you can work out
a series of steps that need to be taken to prevent any damage from occurring.
Now the thing is, no matter what system you’re dealing with, you can always create a schematic
plan of the important elements and their connections.
Your system might or might not be so easy and it might or might not be so concrete.
But even if you’re the owner of a hotel, you can still create a systems plan that would
contain such elements as quality perception of the customers, where the customers go for
their holidays or the running costs of your business.
And by creating the systems schematic and asking and answering what-if questions,
you get to know your system much better.
You start to know what are the elements that, should they change, have a big negative impact
or positive impact on my business, on my life?
And you also see, what are the disturbances from the outside that can affect these elements?
And really, if we think back a couple of months ago, this is exactly what happened.
A lot of people never worked from home for a longer period of time.
Many parents never thought about home schooling before.
Many businesses never thought about having to manage a distributed team.
So everybody wanted to perform while at the same time, they had to get to know the new
systems under which they needed to work.
And that adds a lot of stress.
If, for the important parts of our lives, we frequently ask ourselves “What if this
factor changes?”, “What if this element breaks down?” we get into the habit of thinking
about our system from different points of view.
And then, should the need arise, we can very quickly reprioritise and come up with a new
plan of action which we can then implement.
And this is why it is so important to plan even though the plan itself very often needs
to be chucked out of the window.
It gets us into the position that we’re able to replan and reshuffle as needed.
And so we can still continue to pursue our long-term goals.
After some time you will even surprise yourself by coming up with creative solutions for problems
that have been bugging you for a long time.
The reason for that is that a better understanding, that a deeper knowledge of the system, enables
us to be more creative.
If this sounds strange to you, I made a complete video explaining just this.
And if you’re interested, you can click right here.
Otherwise, please high-five the like-button and until next time: keep thinking!