Questions and Actions
Last Updated on Sunday, 6 December 2009 11:46 Written by Steve Sunday, 6 December 2009 11:44
Jack Ricchiuto has an amazing essay on working beyond goals and plans. His articulation of opportunistic action in a dynamic world resonates with me at the deepest levels. I wrote earlier about how to act now in service of long-term goals, and I find that Jack has summed up everything I was trying to say much more eloquently. Here’s a passage I love, but please go read the entire essay. Thanks to Jodie for passing this on!
New questions are more powerful than plans because they cause us to learn what’s possible rather than presume what’s possible. Learning is the opposite of presumption. Questions lead us to discover clear and passionate vision and notice changes in our world.
Plans create a version of the world that becomes increasingly inaccurate and invalid in a dynamic world. Questions on the other hand make us both more proactive and agile than we would be trying to follow static plans in dynamic environments. They cause us to follow the actual changing landscape of the world rather than a static version of it.
New actions are more powerful than goals because they cause us to do whatever we can to realize our vision of what we want to create as possible. When we commit to any action, we commit to it as long as it’s realizing our vision of what we want to see possible.
The expansiveness of action is the opposite of the constraint of plans. When we act on our new actions, we often discover that it is possible to find ways to realize our questions beyond the limits defined by our plans. Actions are never predefined in the ways that plans predefine us.
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I dunno, this seems way too pat and absolute to me. Does it really have to be either/or? Why can’t you have plans, and then also understand you may need to change them? Is the world really such a swirling ball of chaos that planning anything is useless? Does having goals paralyze you, and preclude more spontaneous action? Not in my experience.
I thought your “small steps” post was much more insightful, and true, than this piece.
Thanks Matthew, I’m glad you like my post. Mine was a pragmatic piece answering a very practical question. I like Jack’s framing because it’s bigger and broader. It’s provoking, for sure. I am going to use it’s advice to change the way I look at what I’m going to do. I still have to make plans–I have bosses and customers who want these things. And it’s true that putting signposts out there helps to keep me on course. And I’ve also completed plans that, looking back, were straightjackets and led me to the wrong place too late.
Steve,
Thanks for the insightful post. This passage reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a business partner. Many organizations and companies still use the method of sticking a flag in the ground and saying, “this is who we are, this is what we do, and this is our product.” And then they attempt to build fences and defend that ground. This approach to planning is becoming increasingly harder, and less desireable to do, as the time span of product lifecycles is rapidly decreasing and the velocity in which new products (and services) are becoming mature or obsolete is increasing. Organizations that remain flexible and are consistently seeking new opportunities, coupled with the ability to align themselves and orchestrate with others quickly, will be in a much greater position to succeed.
Thanks again and be well.
One of the real challenges of working in technology is staying relevant. I struggle with it personally–there is always a new technology to learn, new strategies to try. I find that keeping the questions central helps me stay open to opportunities, rather than guarded against threats.
Interesting post – but what I think needs a bit more unpacking is the interdependent relationships among vision, plans, project, questions and opportunities. I would posit that a vision is the big idea which also serves as a very basic “go that way arrow” for one to look up at if you are mired in implementation details. Plans and projects help you operationalize the vision into implementable actions, and get buy-in, funding, investment, and other support behind you.
Questions and opportunities will come up in the course of working a plan, and it’s important to be open and flexible enough to consider those inputs and possibly augment or otherwise tweak your plan. And yes, it’s possible that sometimes a question or opportunity is such a game-changer that it requires a plan to be rewritten completely. But the more frequent scenario is that a question or opportunity is cause to revisit a plan to determine whether a plan can be augmented or whether, for the purpose of work sustainability something has to come off the plan for a given question to be added.
I think that being intentional about these kinds of tradeoffs is important, not just in terms of the definition of a given plan, but from a psychological standpoint as well. Looking at everything all the time is exhausting and unsustainable. One of best tools you can have in a creative process, is an instinct for which focus to adopt at any given time, and the ability to accept that you will need to view your actions with multiple focal points.
Agreed that looking at everything all the time is challenging. Having been a consultant like yourself, I liked nothing more than concrete targets to hit, rather than have things move around. I think goals and plans are critical to get projects done. I’ve always been squeamish about the next level up of planning, especially in technology today. I want to find a way to have a trajectory that in meaningfully articulated, but not constrained. It’s a difficult balancing act.
That’s where I think a solid vision is really important (and it’s really hard to get to) – it helps you evaluate which questions are likely to yield good results that should be incorporated, which questions, while interesting, should be kept to the side of one’s desk, and when that game-changing opportunity comes around, how to seize it for maximum effect.