Tips For Agile Living

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When I first started this blog I used to write a few business type posts (usually rants about terrible customer service if I’m being honest). After all, my background was business and it seemed natural to post on it every now and then. I even had what I think was one of my best posts on business, The Short -Term Hitmen published on the always brilliant, Put Things Off. Check out the latest post there on iPhones.

Over the last few months though I’ve tapered them off as I’ve concentrated more on life coaching and self-development. That isn’t to say I have lost interest, it’s more a reflection on trying to focus my attention on being a Life Coach as opposed to a professional ranter. Although I do like the idea of ranting professionally if I could earn a living from it.

Todays post is by blogger and Resource Miner (Coach to you and me!) Cath from Mine Your Resources , and an excellent one it is too.

It’s not a short post and can’t really be scanned, but if you’re a regular here you know that’s the deal anyway.

Tips For Agile Living – When The Future is Uncertain

I was at a personal development convention the other day and a religious group was marketing themselves with the slogan,

“Inject some certainty into your life”

I thought, “Wow, wouldn’t that be nice!” You know, if we could just pop a pill or open the bag and just add water, and our fuzzy future would magically crystallize into a nice, neat, ordered picture that perfectly fits our design spec. Nice thought, but highly unlikely!

Nobody Likes Uncertainty.

From a survival point of view, uncertainty can be dangerous. Uncertainty is also time-consuming and slows everything down. You know what it’s like when you’re in a new situation – you have to think about everything carefully and you can’t just do stuff automatically.

There’s a lot more weighing up of options and stopping to check stuff, and double check again, and then walking yourself through the steps… unfamiliarity and uncertainty is so much slower. And it feels crap.

So We Try To Establish As Much Certainty As We Can.

We create a 10-year business plan. We create processes and procedures and we make rules. And we tell everyone about the rules. We make procedures for dealing with the people who are breaking the rules. We put people in charge of monitoring and making sure that nobody is breaking the rules. And then we create systems that restrict people’s behavior, so they can’t break the rules even if they try.

Then we create a department for investigating and monitoring, and for innovating new ways of making sure that the rules, policies and procedures are followed, and for reviewing the rules, policies and procedures. Then we decide that we need another department for communicating the rules, policies ad procedures internally…

And then there’s the guy who’s got a business idea. And he’s going to launch it. You know… soon. He just needs to complete the 5-year business plan. He’s 50 pages in so far, and he’s cautiously optimistic that it’ll work. But he feels it’s important to cover all his bases, and plug all the holes before he launches… so that he’s prepared for the risks and has everything in place.

We’ve Been Taught To Plan, Monitor and Control

In our left-brain-directed world we’ve been taught to think sequentially and logically, and to create detailed goals and plans, in order to manage people, projects and our lives successfully.

This has been widely touted as an important key to success, by business people and life coaches the world over. I suspect in the past 50 years, in a world that was a little more predictable and stable, this has been a useful and relevant strategy.

But as technology advances and we all become so much more interconnected information is flowing faster and change is happening at an exponentially faster rate. We’re all directly impacted by so many more factors than ever before. I wonder whether this traditional form of long-term, detailed planning is still relevant. Whether it perhaps makes for a heavy ship that’s difficult to turn course?

Perhaps the small businesses that are light and liberated from these extensive layers of long-term goals, rules, processes, procedures, policies and plans are the ones that are going to thrive now. Perhaps the people who are able to be flexible and agile and embrace change personally and professionally will be the happiest in this new era.

I’m not suggesting that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Progress requires a clear intention and a basic game plan. It’s a great idea to automate some of your processes to allow you to focus on the really important, or really fun stuff.

What I’m suggesting is that perhaps we could do with a bit more flexibility, and a bit more space for stuff to happen organically. Perhaps a spec that takes a year to complete might be out of date by the time it’s completed. And that perhaps we need to spend less time planning and analyzing, and more time doing – and noticing the results, and adjusting and refining from there. And that perhaps it doesn’t have to be perfect before we get it out there.

So here are a few Agile Living Strategies for adjusting the way you move yourself and your business forward in these turbulent times:

1) You Don’t Have To Set Specific Long-Term Goals

Creating specific long-term plans has the benefit of making you really focused, but it has the drawback of limiting your vision and causing you to rule out lots of possibilities. It also has the disadvantage of causing us to get attached to specific outcomes when it’s possible that other outcomes we hadn’t expected or defined in our goals could be even better. In a world that’s evolving exponentially with new ideas and technologies becoming available all the time, you could miss out if you’ve got a blinkered, long-term plan.

It’s  said that we over-estimate what we can achieve in 1 year and we under-estimate what we can achieve in 5 years. In that case, we’d be limiting ourselves by creating a 5-year plan. For most of my adult life, I’ve rarely set goals more than 6 to 9 months into the future, and it’s worked well for me. As I look back, I can see that, if I’d set 5-year goals 5 years ago, I’d never have imagined I could have achieved what I achieved in the past 5 years.

I’ve found it useful to use values to anchor the “big picture” of my life and let my specific goals have a shorter-term focus.

2) Get Out There And Fail Faster

Many people will tell you that you need a detailed long-term life and business plan, in writing, with all the details ironed out, before you take action to launch your business or whatever else you want to do. There are of course advantages to thinking things through before you jump, but these sorts of documents can also serve to trigger analysis paralysis, and to support your resistance and procrastination. And they’re often outdated and irrelevant by the time you’ve completed them.

Our high-change, highly connected, high-information world means that you can take your ideas to market much more quickly than ever before, and if you don’t, someone else will – and you’ll be left behind with your nice neatly bound detailed plan, while they’re out in the real world learning from real world feedback, adjusting their action, and making the big bucks.

So you don’t need a detailed plan. Go out and take some action, get feedback, adjust, take more action, get feedback, adjust…

It’s like playing the warmer/colder game I played as a child. One of us would hide an object and then the other would go looking for it. The person who hid the object would give feedback along the way, saying “warmer” if you were moving closer to the object and “colder if you were moving further away from the object. You didn’t need a map or a plan. All you had to do was listen to the feedback, keep taking action, and you’d find the object quickly.

3) Drop Your Belief In The Idea That There Are Wrong Decisions

One of the biggest causes of paralysis is the belief that there are right and wrong decisions, that you need to conduct extensive research before you can take action. This isn’t necessarily true. People are breaking the “rules” and pioneering new ways all the time.

What happens when you consider the idea that perhaps there are no right or wrong decisions – perhaps all decisions are opportunities to get results, to get feedback and to learn, and to experience life? And that perhaps these days breaking the rules and doing something different is a powerful way to get noticed and build your following.

The pain of mistakes and other “bad things” happening is exactly what’s useful for us, to give us opportunities to learn and grow.

How would you live if you knew for sure that there are no right or wrong decisions and that you could handle any outcome and be happy with the results of whatever decision you made?

Can you feel that relief, that sense of possibility? Can you feel the fear and stress fall away? Can you feel how much easier it could be to continue to give your all to putting yourself out there and making a loving contribution, in spite of the risks?

So this is what I’m thinking:

The new era is about living loose. The world is too interconnected and complex for us to plan and control everything. If your only strategy is to control, you’re going to be stiff and brittle like the structure that breaks because it can’t bend.

Those who develop Agile Living Strategies will be like the structure that can take immense pressure and bend with it, without breaking.

They’ll be the people who can change their minds and their businesses and their ways of doing things elegantly, to respond to changing needs and to continue to be relevant and add value. They’ll be the ones who’ll thrive.

And I think we’re already seeing it. What do you think?

You can follow Cath on Twitter and she also has an upcoming free teleseminar with Jevon Dangeli, on “How to stay cool, calm & collected in times of uncertainty” on Mon 27th.  You can sign up here.