Be prepared

Michael ran into a friend at the grocery store. He noted his friend's shopping cart was filled to overflowing with chips, pretzels, dips, soft drinks, and beer. “You’re having a party and didn’t invite me?” he asked of his friend. ”No, I’m just getting ready for next week. The big four are all on TV at once. I gotta be prepared for anything!”

Yes, by the time you read this, if you are so inclined you can watch baseball, football, basketball, and hockey games simultaneously as the four reasons overlap in a rare sports calendar sort of way. And Michael’s friend indeed was preparing for it.

You don’t have to be a Boy Scout or former Scout or parent of a Scout to recognize the importance of that simple phrase, ‘Be Prepared.” Many projects have been derailed because people weren’t diligent in their preparations. Effectively managing home, school, work, and play activities all take some effort for preparation to be successful.

It’s possible, and we have personal examples as we’re sure many others do too, of successfully navigating some activity with little or no preparation. But in all of those cases, more energy was expended fretting over the outcome than would have been in more adequately preparing for them. Not a sustainable way to conduct life.

You can prepare for all possible situations, and we’ve written about the importance of planning for and addressing all scenarios in “Conquer the what-ifs.” There we wrote about bringing Failure Mode Analysis (FMA) into your daily life. FMA is a system that as many things as possible that can go wrong are anticipated, and remedies planned and in waiting before the opportunity for failure happens. It is a system of looking at each ‘what if’ moment and following it to a logical ‘if then’ solution.

Not all plans need to be prepared for in such detail. Sometimes simply examining the plan and making appropriate adjustments to your thought processes based on the most logical, common, or rational potential interruption will increase your chance of success - or at least lessen the number of opportunities for poor performance. Just as the Boy Scout may not plan for every potential setback, he prepares enough to bring rain gear and extra warm socks when camping during the rainy season.

Whether you plan for every possible contingency or for only the most obvious, the idea of being prepared should not be simply skipped over. It may seem counterintuitive but the key to planning for success is not in anticipating the positive outcomes but in anticipating potential difficulties and negative outcomes. We already know what we will do if things go right. The perfect plan is to prepare yourself for when things go wrong so that you can have the solutions in place and ready to go.

The wise sports fanatic makes sure he has enough chips and dips to last all 4 games without having to make a snack run between innings or during a half time. Likewise, the wise camper doesn’t wait for the first drops to fall but brings a poncho when it looks cloudy. They are both prepared, and both will end the day with the knowledge that they can take on even bigger plans next time.