You exist in a sea of the attachment
Executives have strategic planning meetings, and emerge with a roadmap for the next year that shows where they expect to be, and often how they expect to get there.
Nobody knows what the intervening 365+ days will bring. But there’s a “plan.”
Managers take that roadmap and begin laying out directions and plans for their teams.
Quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals get created to define “what’s supposed to happen.”
But nobody knows what’s coming even the next time the sun rises.
Behind
Inevitably, what happens differs from the plans.
More often than not, the difference is being “behind.” Behind schedule, below target, beneath expectations.
That’s the source of the majority of business upset and anxiety.
The upset is attachment to what a poorly-informed vision of the future says that “now” should be.
Once formed, plans take on a permanence that they cannot deliver.
When do you know more about the work you’re doing? A month ago before you started, or today when you have a month’s experience?
The attachment to “how it’s going to be” creates stress, anxiety, and upset any time the present reality is less “good” than the way we imagined it would be.
Holding on to that attachment about “how it will look” creates stress and limits your success.
Breaking Attachment
It’s not to say that plans are bad, or that they have no value. You benefit from having clear Intentions and outcomes in mind. What creates most of the upset is attachment to a specific “picture of the future.”
One way to break down the permanence to plans as predictions is to be disciplined in the language and concepts used.
“Roadmaps” imply that there are known roads that won’t change.
Strategies evolve and change in response to new information.
This is part of what set Agile apart from traditional project planning. Agile understands that you learn more about how to reach the goal by building towards the goal. And that the goal itself tends to evolve as you do the work and understand the problem better.
Build a strong habit around things like asking “Given what we know now, what do we want to refine in our goal, what time frame do we think is realistic, and how confident are we in that prediction?”
Avoid the “specification crafting” approach to breaking down a project into precisely defined bites of work. Focus on what needs to be built or done in the next few weeks in order to better understand risks. Tackle “the scary parts” early, and use what you learn from that to improve your shared understanding of the whole project.
And most of all, when things inevitably get tense and “behind,” name your attachment to the original plan. Acknowledge the impact it has on the feeling of stress, and then see if you can let go of that attachment.
You can do this. I can help.