What’s your plan, Stan? What’s your agenda, Brenda? What’s the deal, McNeil? What’s the story, Maurie? What’s the arc, Mark? Okay. Enough of that silliness. We’ve been writing about planning this week because one of the chapters in our new book is “Write a 250 Year Plan”. I have to be honest, as I said the other day, I keep things on a shorter time frame for now. But the fact is, there’s nothing really all that crazy about making 100 or 200 year plans, because one of the key ingredients in a good plan is adjusting it to meet realities along the way.
I’m going to use the example of the world’s most sophisticated new jet fighters. A few of them have such unusual aerodynamics to help them do what they do that they’re actually intrinsically unstable. They require an actively engaged in-flight computer to make constant minute adjustments that no human pilot could possibly manage. Yet they can fly in the dark, at low altitude, through inclement weather, to their eventual destination thousands of miles away.
This is a key part of having a good plan. You don’t just lay in the plans, fire up the engines, and point yourself at the destination, hoping to hit the bullseye five years later. Good planning still requires constant attention to progress or to obstacles that may arise. And those minute changes you make along the way can have some of the biggest impact. You may have heard the old analogy about how if you’re struggling to make change, that it’s useful to think of your life like a big ship. It has a lot of momentum, so sometimes you can’t just make a quick 180 turn. But an adjustment of a few degrees NOW is a difference of MILES in your course across the ocean.
So are you flying by wire, or by the seat of your pants? There’s a subtle but dramatic difference!
