When People Don’t Plan

How do you respond when someone makes life more complicated for you?

Do you ever see it coming before the problems get there? If you do, does that make it easier or harder to deal with?

I’m pretty good at seeing why things might go wrong and developing contingency plans to deal with them. Much of my career has involved problem solving and I’ve found prevention is one of the best ways to deal with most of them. Several of my job titles have even had the word “Planner” in them.

What is it Ben Franklin said? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

Gorgeous says I’m a bit of a “hole poker”. She says that I poke all kinds of holes in plans and any plan that survives my efforts ends up being a pretty stinking good one. I tend to be pretty good at seeing why things won’t work, and as a result lean toward the “glass half empty” way of looking at things.

I would prefer to be more of an optimist.

But I’m not – yet.

That’s why I get especially frustrated when people do things that become a hassle for me. Way too much of the time I see the hassle heading at me.

Like today. We got called to do a job by a shipping company. The problem is, there are a whole bunch of things that need to happen yet before we can do our part. Some of them have to be done by a vendor of the customer of the company hiring us. And the vendor doesn’t currently have a very solid reputation of coming through.

In the words of Jayne Cobb, “I smell a lot of if coming off this plan.”

I am working at becoming more optimistic. I try to keep in mind that we will still get paid for the job (eventually), and probably even more than if things went smoothly. I try to remember that if it was easy, anyone could do it and they wouldn’t need to hire us in the first place.

But too often my mind reduces the optimism to so much “blah, blah, blah.”

The adage, “A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part” doesn’t really hold true in my line of work. I still get to deal with the emergency. And often it is completely unnecessary.

How do you respond? Do you tend to see how things might work, or what might go wrong?

If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email or RSS Feed.

Powered by Qumana