the problem with plan B

The mountaineer and outdoor clothing millionaire Yvon Chouinard said: "if you bring bivy gear, you'll end up bivying". "Bivy" is short for "bivouac", which means to sleep out somewhat unexpectantly on the mountain. What he meant was, if you carry a lot of heavy camping gear on a climb you'll probably end up climbing so slowly that you'll have to spend the night on the way up.

Contingency planning seems on paper to be a good idea. It seems smart to ask the question, "what do we do if we don't succeed?" "What happens if we don't reach the target, achieve the goal or hit the mark?"

The problem with having a plan "b" in case "plan "a" doesn't work out, is that we often end up executing plan "b". We inadvertently, subtly and unconsciously let ourselves off the hook from fully striving, aspiring and stretching.

The book "Don't Think of an Elephant" points this out. If I ask you not to think of an ELEPHANT, you can't help but think of an ELEPHANT. We tend to go where we are looking and end up where we are thinking. Superbike racers know this fact well: on a tight turn, the bike goes where your eyes go; if you look at the ditch that's where you'll end up. The same goes for climbing. I've never found it helpful to look at the ground, as a reminder of the consequences of a lapse of focus or judgement.

Is it great to manage risk? Yes. Is it good to operate as if the contingency plan was the main plan? Probably not.

the answer is in the question

In design school, I came to appreciate that a well-defined problem is half-solved. Nothing so big as "how do we create world peace?" and nothing so trivial as "how do I cross the street?". Something in the middle is very constructive.

Great questions frame the entire problem-solving exercize. For example, in any professional service, the main problem for the service providers is that when we are not working, we are not making any money. Most service providers operate essentially a fee-for-service, billable hour set-up that has very little leverage and many barriers to scale.

Since I come from the industrial design world where we designed products that come off a production line–I've been interested in the service leverage problem. It's a design problem.

The problem ultimately is that a professional "practice" is missing several attributes that a high-leverage, scaleable "business" has. Michael Gerber made this distinction when he talked about "working in a business" versus "working on a business."
Creating leverage is the Holy Grail of the service world.

So the question: "how do I convert my coaching practice into a coaching business?" actually frames all of my business development activities as it forces me to see the opportunities for leverage and scale that I'm blind to as I practice my service. Now I'm working on building a team, a brand, programs on-line and a capital structure that makes it easy to bring partners on board. That's leverage. That's a business.

From a framing perspective, I like to think that I cannot really ask a question that at some level of conscious I don't have at least the start of an answer. If I can think of a question, I probably have the answer. Or my team does.

team building lessons from a school of fish

When I was courting my wife, she lived in Edmonton and was a keen Fringe fanatic. The Edmonton Fringe Festival happens for a few weeks every summer and draws all sorts of "unusual" performers and an equally "unusual" audience.

Tania had been attending the festival for many years and got to watch many different kinds of experimental theatre and performance art. She thought it wise to introduce me into this world slowly and picked what she thought was a relatively conservative stand-up comic for my first experience. No point in scaring off the new boyfriend.

As it turned out, dude was flat out weird.

As it turns out, dude was flat out weird, in a really magnificent way.

He started his show with the lights off, as he gave a diatribe about the tenuous boundary that exists between a performer and the audience. The boundary is the stage.

He brought one guy up on stage and predictably had some mildly embarrassing fun with him. Then he brought a second person up and started playing with both. Then a third, then a fourth and then, eventually, he had all of us on stage and he went into the "audience." This process reversed what I think we all considered to be the stage. Audience members were now performers. Kinda.

While we were up on stage–maybe 150 of us–our host taught us how to act like a fish. We all crouched as we walked, with a hand flipping behind us simulating our tails, and our cheeks sucked into our teeth with our lips making the familiar fish mouth.

We practiced this a fews times and then he led us outside. We walked down Whyte Avenue as a normal looking, albeit large group and every once in a while he'd yell fish! and we'd all assume the fish position. We packed into several bars and he yelled fish! We surrounded a few innocent pedestrians and did "fish." Then we went into the middle of the intersection of Whyte and Calgary Trail–one of the busiest intersections in the city–and did "fish", blocking the road for several lights both ways.

We closed by singing the theme to the Flinstones, which of course by that time seemed like the normal thing to do. Then he disbanded the group and we all went our separate ways.

In 60 minutes, our "stand-up comedian" led us through one of the most interesting group bonding processes I've ever been through. I felt truly sad when it ended.