There Is No Plan
Here’s a dialogue that happened at a team meeting the other day…
EMILY: So what’s the plan?
ME: We have optionality at this point to develop one.
DAVID: I think he just said there is no plan, but it sounded smart.
EMILY (unamused): I’m glad you enjoyed that.
David later added, “It was also your delivery. It made me confident in the non-plan that you just laid out. Me in my head: ‘Well it’s always good to have optional…wait a minute!’”
Gun to my head, did I have a plan? No. But was this Mad Max nihilistic-post-apocalyptic-the-plan-is-there-is-no-plan stuff? Also no. (Though imagine if Pig Killer in that scene there said “We have optionality at this point to develop one.”)
Worse, though, than disappointing Emily is that when I tweeted (X’d? posted?) about this amusing episode on whatever Elon Musk is now calling the platform he purchased, I got called out by Bill for “Next level corporate speak.”
It was not that!
It was that I (and Sarah (and maybe you’re guessing by now that this has something to do with Unqualified Opinions (and did I just use a parens inside a parens?))) had started working on something that could go in many different directions. And in the course of working on it, intentionally did not do anything that cut any one of those directions off. Instead, because we didn’t have a plan and didn’t know what a good one might look like since we didn’t know what the end product might look like, preserved open-endedness.
In other words, if you don’t know where you want to go, it’s fine not to know where you’re going. Instead, keep making choices that create more choices, and if you do that, you might just end up someplace valuable, plan or no plan.
Remember that, and have a great weekend.
– By Tim Hanson
