Have you noticed how people’s ideas of planning and preparation differ? I have often felt a bit guilty because I tend to push against plans that are, to my mind, too rigid. I wince sometimes when I hear people planning to the nth degree. That was my first response when I read Tim Davies’ blog about planning until I started to reflect on the discussion. I think, on balance, I do have a plan for most things. I won’t necessarily broadcast that plan because it often lack details; it’s mostly an updated direction of travel should things not work out on this current trajectory.

When you encounter a new situation it is helpful to react by moving in a sensible direction. Our fight or flight response will make us stand our ground, run away or freeze. However if you don’t know in which direction you need to run you may get yourself in trouble. It is said that when a couple walks into a social setting the woman will, within a few seconds, have worked out which other couples are forming, which are falling apart, who have fallen out and who are getting closer. In the same time the bloke will have worked out where the food, the toilet and the escape exit are. If you don’t have a rough idea of what direction you’re going to travel you may run up a blind alley.

I believe this is where planning comes in. In the flying world pilots are encouraged to learn ‘immediate actions’. These are sometimes also called ‘bold face drills’ because in the flight reference cards (FRCs) they are printed in bold. However, before these immediate actions can be carried out there is an even more important requirement: fly the aircraft. The mnemonic ‘aviate, navigate, communicate’ is probably a more important priority list. The FRCs are undoubtedly a very useful check list and an excellent plan but the actual emergency might not be exactly as the engineers and the authors of the cards anticipated.

What you should do is set off in a direction but then start to review the direction of travel before it becomes too ‘set in stone’ (see my blog about changing vectors). I’ve long thought that companies that select people through their ability to solve simple problems set themselves up for problems down stream because they don’t assess the ability to deal with wicked problems: the ability to change direction when more information becomes available…or even when the original information is analyzed in greater depth. The military has countless ‘leaders’ who are wedded to the idea that changing direction is a sign of weakness; they’ll press on as the gulf between their plan and reality grows.

The initial ‘plan’ is part of the work we should do to strengthen our core. The more we rehearse a direction of travel the more likely we are to follow that direction when we encounter something new. For example we inadvertently have a ‘direction of travel’ when we meet someone new. If your ‘planned’ direction is to distrust everyone ‘below’ in the hierarchy or of a different gender, ethnicity or age they’ll notice that distrust and refuse to trust you in return. Better to train yourself to set off in a neutral direction until you have had a chance to refine the plan.

I wonder whether there is a place for integrated planning, like my idea of integrated learning (see blog on Linked In).

y = m is a straight line on a graph. The plan never changes. As Blackadder says “would this be the plan where we climb out of the trenches and walk very slowly towards the enemy?”

Refining the plan in the light of a post-event debrief is akin to integrating it once:

y = mx is now a line with a gradient. The plan is changed by constant increments. But it relies on people being prepared to change the plan and even if they will change the changes are subjected to a rigid process.

Training your ability to review and plan ‘on the hoof’ and accepted that changes need not be linear integrates the equation further:

y = mx squared.

It’s probably all to do with having a plan that allows you to use all three parts of your brain. The fight or flight response needs a direction to go. The chimp will want to defend a position so it needs something to keep it busy. Then the human brain, when it catches up, can review the work of the other two brains and refine the plan or maybe change direction.

In essence planning to adjust the plan in the light of new evidence is very important. After we have ‘aviated’ (put the aircraft at the right speed), navigated (pointed in a safe direction), and communicated (told someone, even the rest of the crew of our plan) it’s good practice to ‘sit on your hands’. Do nothing until your human brain has caught up.

Many people criticize ‘unworkable’ plans as ‘planning to fail’. I disagree. A plan is often a basis for change but you have to know what you’re starting from before you can make any realistic changes.

Many years ago I was training officer on the Chinook operational conversion unit. We ‘converted’ pilots, mostly fresh out of the box with newly minted wings, teaching them how to fly and operate the Chinook. The collective inner chimp in the ivory towers generating policy thought it was best to run large unwieldy courses. The usual approach was to crisis manage the courses all the way through, sticking rigidly to ‘sensible’ plans and ‘sensible’ planning assumptions and then push the end of the course back when it didn’t work properly.

I approached the problem a different way. It was quite labour intensive initially as I planned the whole course in detail before we’d even started. I built in chunks of flex time so I had a bit of room for manoeuvre. It allowed me to allocate the same instructors to the same students for large portions of the course so there was continuity and even the chance that individual instructors would tweak their delivery as necessary confident in the knowledge they could pre-load or pick up missed exercises when conditions warranted. Plenty of people told me how foolhardy I was doing all that extra effort and… “anyway, it’s bound to come off the rails at some point.”

The beauty of this approach was that when something did change – aircraft refused to work, British weather took its toll – I was able to adjust the plan knowing what the knock-on would be. Despite the changes I was still able to ring fence people’s leave or unexpected weddings etc. Sometimes, I even brought forward other elements. Unfortunately, I had one of those bosses you dread. Not clever enough to keep up with the original plan he waded in with his size 8s (I think he had quite small feet – indicative of brain size I suspect) and tried to force me to go back to a ‘sensible” way of planning. That caused extra work I hadn’t budgeted for. I didn’t really change my approach because it was benefiting everyone else, but I had to put more effort into disguise.

In essence, and exactly as Tim Davies would say: fail to plan; plan to fail. That said, understand that your plan isn’t a digital ‘thing’. Once it’s made there’s no reason it can’t be changed in the light of new evidence. Plan to re-plan as necessary.

Coaching is a lot about challenging assumptions. If your life plan or whatever plan you’re working to isn’t getting you what you want have another look at the plan. If you’d like me to help you review your options please drop me a line either through the Inflow Performance Facebook page, the Breaking Free group page or the Inflow Performance website.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Jace