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Accidental starts!

By Bamboo In The Wind

The usual inclination is to chalk everything on paper and have a plan. Planning is an excellent start while considering possible contingencies, hurdles, rollbacks, and corrective strategies. We must know. However, there are very many assumptions that have the potential to derail them. It is usually not enough to entirely rely on speculative planning if we are to succeed. 

On-the-feet thinking has a role. It is to think as you enter into a situation, make sense of the situation on the spot and take corrective actions as best as you can, keeping the dynamic assessment in mind.

Fixed procedural plans, learning as we go,  and flexibility to think on the feet are great ways to tackle most of what we are likely to face in any work situation.

As easy as it sounds, it requires courage to steer away from what we had already decided as a code of conduct. Deviation depends on how we apply our knowledge and intelligence of the situation and make firm decisions that may turn out disastrously.

The critical part is to have the courage to know we may be wrong, and we need to repeat the process iteratively until we get to the outcome we are looking for.

Accidental starts can nudge us out of overplanning syndrome. It makes us plunge into action surrounded by a plethora of intelligence we can learn from. Sometimes, there is no better plan than to start like this.

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