Excessive planning often results in not enough of your work being shipped. Flying by the seat of your pants is the other extreme where you deliver work that may not be your best effort or well thought out. Neither extreme is in and of itself bad. The trick is to understand where on the continuum you are operating.
Planning or flying – that is the question
I have not been a planner. As I look back on my life I realize that I have been flying by the seat of my pants more than working to a specific plan. That’s not to say I don’t plan at all. Instead I tend to be willing to move away from the plan and explore new opportunities as they come up. While I’m good at flying by the seat of my pants, I find I’m drifting more towards being a planner (just not excessively so).
Larger projects require a framework. As the projects I am involved in become larger, the need for both an operational and design framework become obvious. As way of example, ColorMetrix will likely be employing several additional people in the coming year. I saw this coming about two months ago and began thinking about who I’d want to work with on the projects in question.
Reaching out early. I began reaching out to some of the people over the last four to six weeks. Now, as the projects ramp up I already know who is interested and who is not. I’ve got a list of resources (people and companies) I can call on and within days build a functional team. By looking ahead just a couple of months I will be able to move the project forward more quickly than if I had chosen to wait and search the resources out once the project work had been awarded.
Flying still has it’s place. I was on-site with a new customer yesterday installing and training them on one of our products. You never know what to expect when you walk in. Even with planning meetings via conference call there are many unknowns. Will they have run the print samples you asked them to? Will they really have the administrative login privileges for the computer as you have asked? When you show up will half their equipment be unexpectedly down so they are in crisis mode?
Being an experienced pilot helps. In these situations where the plan normally goes to hell in a hand basket the moment you walk in, flying by the seat of you pants is a valuable skill set.
At the end of the day I feel it’s about finding some semblance of balance that works for you. How do you feel about planning versus flying?
Hmmmm…. wonder which side of the fence I fall on in this topic. 🙂 But I do agree Jim that finding some sort of balance is the best way. But something I have learned is that to find that balance you yourself don’t always have to find your way to the middle, but find others to who balance out your tendencies. I try to move to the middle and plan more, and I can, but I won’t necessarily be as “successful” as I would like. But if I find trusted people with those skills and surround myself with them, the result just plain rocks! And it frees me up to do/be what I do best.
I know which side of the fence you are on. 😉 That’s in fact part of my growth plan for ColorMetrix is to bring some people in to help with the things I’m not great at.
I really like the close with being an experienced pilot helps. Sometimes what we do, or provide, is pretty straight forward to many professionals in our industry. But experience affords us the ability to fly by the seat of our pants sometimes. We are almost always prepared for what can go wrong because we’ve seen it happen before. Like ESP, we know something will happen.
I’m very excited to read that CM is expanding and so much positive is going on for you! All of your hard work to get to this “overnight success” has resulted in a lot of open doors.
Can’t wait to hear more sir.
Stay tuned this is the channel where you will hear it 🙂