This post is part of my Be Your Own Manager series. Click here for an overview, and links to all other posts.
Once upon a career, in a city far away, I took a workshop with a successful theatre director in which he talked about Plans.
According to his theory of how great theatre comes together, the director is the one person who has to come in with ALL of the plans already formed, and then be willing to throw any aspect of those plans out if someone else in the room comes up a compelling reason. That other person could be an actor making a fantastic-but-surprising choice for their character, or a designer bringing an unexpected visual. It could be a technician solving a physical limitation of the space, or the stage manager discovering a safety concern. Whatever happens, the director needs to be willing to abandon the part of their plan directly impacted and change everything else.
So that’s what I tried to do for every show I worked on. Make all the plans. Abandon many of them. Make new plans. Every. Day.
All of my teacher-friends tell me they do something similar. Business leaders, too. Certainly, event planners appreciate the necessity of this process.
And always, some people will ask: if you’re going to have to change your plans, anyway, why make them?
Well, because someone has to. Because without any plans, you have a room full of actors, or a classroom full of fifth graders, staring at you until they get bored and start creating chaos.
I’ve discovered, as a writer alone with my words, the same thing can happen. If my Manager-brain doesn’t make any plans, all the chaos gremlins in my imagination will cause overwhelm and then paralysis, followed by complete system breakdown.
On the other hand, if my Manager-Brain insists on holding onto old plans, even when new information has made them outdated, things start to break down in a different way. Maybe I feel increasingly like I’m ignoring exciting opportunities that can only come from change. Or maybe I’ve been ignoring a safety issue.
This is where I must make a confession: This wasn’t the next subject I’d planned to cover in this series. I had a plan. Not just for the BYOM series, but for the blog as a whole. That plan was pretty detailed, in fact, with a content calendar, and a work schedule. But once I started working, I started finding the weak spots in that plan.
And I forgot the most important thing about plans. That all of them, no matter how carefully thought out, are subject to change.
Sometimes, those changes are spurred by internal reasons, like learning more about yourself and your capabilities. Sometimes, the changing force is external, because the world around you requires a different kind of response than it did when you started.
In the last several months, I’ve encountered both internal and external reasons for change, but I waited too long to admit that to myself. Now, I’m finally pivoting. Changing my plans. And because I waited so long, I need a bigger change, sooner. The chaos gremlins have taken control, and I’ve missed several of my own self-imposed deadlines.
I almost kept all of this to myself. But then I remembered the whole point of this blog. The biggest part of the plan that isn’t going to change is my whole reason for doing it: Because I believe in learning from my mistakes, and I believe that we can all learn from each other’s mistakes, as well. Each of my guest bloggers has shared their vulnerabilities with us, and it’s only fair for me to do the same.
I’ve made plans. Now I’m going to abandon a few of them and change the rest to suit.
I don’t yet know exactly what’s the end result is going to look like, but I know I’m not giving up. Changing plans doesn’t have to mean quitting or abandoning everything. I’ll be back, you can count on it.