Introduction and Episode Question

[00:00:03] Karen: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals. 

[00:00:09] Paul: I'm Paul Tevis.

[00:00:10] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:00:11] Paul: Each episode we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, what could go wrong?

[00:00:18] Karen: So this is one of those classic things that we would like to say, it sort of facetiously well, what could go wrong?

[00:00:24] Karen: We're all in good shape, we're fine. It's all gonna be great. We're gonna suggest that's not the way you wanna ask this question. We're gonna suggest that it's a really good idea to be thinking about what could go wrong and frankly to be expecting that some things will go wrong.

The Importance of Planning for Failure

[00:00:41] Karen: So when you're planning, maybe you're organizing an event, maybe you're putting together a project, maybe you're working on some kind of deadline thing. Whatever it is, if it's got many moving parts, and a number of those are human things. There's really good odds that it's not all going to just fall like domino's.

[00:01:00] Karen: Everything as expected in its place, the way it's gonna go. And what that means is that if you don't want chaos and you really would like to avoid failure, you need to be planning as though some things are going to go wrong and not necessarily the ones that you can predict. So we have kind of some steps within this to be thinking about in terms of, how to give yourself some resiliency for when the things that will go wrong do go wrong. 

Expecting the Unexpected

[00:01:28] Paul: Yeah, it's really that notion that whenever humans are involved, you should expect the unexpected. There's the kind of set of things that you can expect might go wrong. Sometimes this is described as the set of things that are probable. Like we can actually think about how likely these things are because they happen with some discernible frequency.

[00:01:47] Paul: And if you do enough of these types of things, you can predict, eh, five times outta 10. It doesn't go this way, it goes that way instead and sort of thing. Those are the kinds of things that in your planning, like it really is useful to ask what could go wrong to start to get those kinds of things out on the table, the kinds of unexpected events that you might actually expect.

[00:02:08] Paul: Because they are typical, right? This is where it's useful to tap into the expertise of somebody who's done this kind of thing before, whether or not that's a technology rollout, a particular type of event, whatever one of these things is. Like if you talk to somebody who's done this kind of thing before, they can usually tell you, yeah, these are usually the three or four things that don't go according to the optimistic plan.

[00:02:32] Paul: And that you should actually just be ready for. That you should have your contingencies kind of already built out because there's a good likelihood that one of those things will come up while you're trying to do the thing. Because if your plan is built on the optimistic feeling that everything is gonna go according to the plan, if there are humans involved, I can guarantee that's not true, right?

[00:02:57] Paul: You should know that something will go wrong. That something unexpected will happen and likely there will be something on this list of probable things that will pop up. And so that's partly just good planning.

[00:03:09] Karen: Yeah. 

Detailed Planning and Transparency

[00:03:10] Karen: And I also wanna say that good planning is like literally having a detailed plan. There are people who seem to get through life by sort of flying by the seat of their pants and they're really good at juggling and multitasking and dealing with whatever life throws at them, that kind of thing.

[00:03:27] Karen: And that's okay, but even people who are good at that, if your plan is, I'm going to rely on my skill for juggling in order to make this all go well. You don't have any capacity for the things that go wrong then. So having a detailed plan, and having a number of people who know that plan, so if it's an event, maybe there's a schedule, and a list of who's gonna do what.

[00:03:51] Karen: My first wedding, I had planned that all out. I had figured out which of the groomsmen was gonna pay all of the vendors, and I handed him a set of checks at the beginning and I knew who was gonna go pick up the keg that needed to come. And I knew who was gonna, like, there was a whole list, and I emailed that list to everyone on the list before the event so that there's already built in some backup, right?

[00:04:12] Karen: If something doesn't happen, I'm not the only one who knows how it was supposed to happen. That kind of thing. So having some transparency about it, and a good bit of detail in this is who's gonna do what, when. 

[00:04:25] Paul: And the more people who are involved, the better of idea that is. Because you know, it's the sort of thing where if it's a small event and I'm the only person kind of running or coordinating it, then yeah, I probably can rely on my own improvisation around it when something comes up and goes sideways.

[00:04:41] Paul: But if I'm doing something where you are doing something in the morning for this thing and then you're gonna hand it off to this person over here, but meanwhile I'm gonna be doing that thing over there, and this is also happening over there like six or seven. The more cooks there are in the kitchen, the more useful it is to have that plan.

[00:04:58] Paul: The Happy Path plan. Be explicit so that we all have that, because the more people who are involved, the harder it is to fly by the seat of your pants.

[00:05:08] Karen: Yeah, so I think step one is to for sure, have a detailed plan and share it broadly so that everybody who might be able to solve problems has the information that would allow them to do that. And then look for those, what Paul was saying, like those most likely things that go wrong. So like when I'm doing workshops, I know the most likely things to go wrong are we start late because people show up late or things take longer.

[00:05:34] Karen: Like timing things are a big thing on the list of what goes wrong. If I'm running a workshop, so I know to make backup plans and have extra activities in my pocket I can use. And also have plan for maybe a little less than I think is gonna fit, because things always take longer than I think they're gonna, that kind of thing.

[00:05:53] Karen: And also food things are a classic, like how is lunch gonna happen and how is cleanup gonna happen? And those kinds of things, like those are classic, very likely problem areas. So double check those things and have a backup for what might happen if whatever needs, you know, whatever comes up. So I think that's super useful too.

Scenario Planning and Resiliency

[00:06:17] Paul: And you can basically just kind of come up with your scenarios, right? We start late because people have difficulty finding a place to park or artan late, whatever have you. Lunch shows up, but is set up half an hour early and it's a hot food, so it's all gonna get cold. Like, you can kind of list those things out and then go back and look at your plan and go, so if this happens, what would we do?

[00:06:35] Paul: If this happens, what would we do if this? Ha. And then you can see where you've got those resiliency points in and that may help you go back and finesse your plan a little bit to go, oh, you know what? If we move to this part to here, that means we can deal with, it doesn't matter when lunch shows up and we can work with it.

[00:06:52] Paul: So it can be useful just to come up with those likely scenarios and go through your plan and go, if that happens, what would we do? And that's a good way of kind of stress testing it. And you know, this isn't just events. Like my wife and I recently took a trip to Italy and at one point we wanted to take a ferry ride, from one place that we were going to the next hotel.

[00:07:10] Paul: And we said, well, what if it's raining that day and the weather is miserable, and, okay, what would we do instead? Oh, we would take this train. Okay. That's how we would deal with it. And so we had that. So in the moment, we knew what to do if, 'cause it was likely right, it was, there was a good chance the weather wasn't gonna be perfect.

[00:07:29] Paul: And so we knew how we were gonna deal with if it came up. I think then once after you do that, you start to get into this realm of, well, something that we aren't thinking about. And then sometimes we couldn't really expect shows up, right? These are the things that are, you might even call them plausible, that afterwards you go, well, I guess maybe we might have thought that that was gonna happen, or you might beat yourself up afterwards and say, we should have thought that would happen.

[00:07:56] Paul: But honestly, with a lot of these things, like you don't know that you couldn't have predicted that they were gonna happen, but you need to be ready for those unpredictable events to happen. Allison and my business partner and I were recently teaching a class where we discovered at the beginning of day one that there were workers who needed to fix something in the ceiling of the room that we were in, not the sort of thing that we had built into our plan.

[00:08:23] Paul: And so we needed to figure out how to deal with it. And honestly, that's not the kind of thing you would predict, right? That you would go, it's incredibly likely that workers are gonna need to fix the air conditioning in the ceiling of our room, you can't predict that stuff, so you have to take a different approach.

Mindset and Adaptability

[00:08:38] Karen: I think step one of any different approach is what I'm gonna call mindset. I know early on, I would do very detailed plans. I've always been a planner, so I would have this beautiful, detailed plan that I was very attached to. This is dangerous. You do not want to be attached to your plan. You really want a mindset of, oh, so this is the thing we're gonna have to change today.

[00:09:00] Karen: Like that to expect the unexpected that we know it's coming. It's very unlikely that nothing's gonna go wrong that day, and it doesn't mean it's terrible, right? Like, oh, we can't use our room. That seems bad, but maybe we can do something else or the meal didn't show up when we thought it was gonna, okay, how do we pivot?

[00:09:22] Karen: And so I think just making sure that we don't go to the panic place because you know what happens when you panic is that your problem solving disappears. And that's just neurological. And so we wanna make sure that we're prepared for, okay, things are gonna shift and it's gonna be okay. The world is not going to come crashing down.

[00:09:43] Karen: We're going to figure out a way and the thing is going to happen. Whatever it is that needs to happen, and sometimes the, I mean, I was involved in a retreat where sewage backed up and we had to do all sorts of messy things. And at the end when we asked people the, you know, the participants who experienced the problem but didn't have to deal with it, and they said, you know what?

[00:10:01] Karen: Drew us closer together. And we kind of had maybe a closer experience because like kind of brings down your boundaries a little bit. If nobody's allowed to shower for two days, it shifted the experience and was not an entirely bad thing. Not that we built that into the next retreat. But just being able to have that like it's gonna be okay and it's gonna be more okay because I keep my wits about me is super important.

[00:10:23] Paul: The keeping your wits about you is really the key thing there. And I think that happens like in a lot of organizational stuff where there's, a big change initiative. We're gonna roll this thing out. I was talking with someone who works at the university here, and they're changing over their finance system over the summer.

[00:10:39] Paul: Well, you know, it's the best time of year to do it, but apparently their entire, like payroll and procurement system is gonna be dark, as they said for 10 days. And, and I just found myself going, I imagine it's gonna be more than 10, because those things never go smooth. But it's in those 10 days when something unexpected happens, like, oh, we didn't realize that, this thing wasn't under warranty anymore and this machine doesn't work and this has never been turned off.

[00:11:04] Paul: And when we turned it back on again, it didn't work. You know, kinds of things. As you said, kind of the worst thing you can do is panic, because it reduces your problem solving ability. And so going into it, knowing that you're gonna uncover stuff is useful because it can help ground you, like when the unexpected happens.

[00:11:21] Paul: But then the other piece is when something comes up that does start to bring up your anxiety around it. When you do get the unexpected event happening, having a practice for how you get back to good problem solving space is useful. Sometimes people have said to me like something happens and that participant will usually look at me and say like, what should we do?

[00:11:43] Paul: And I say, we should definitely panic. Which often gets them back out of that. So they go, yeah, okay. I was panicking. And that is not useful. Right? But that's the practice for me is kind of going, how can we recognize, okay, this isn't the end of the world because I've already assessed, okay, the actual impact of this is probably not gonna be horrible, but what can we do?

[00:12:02] Paul: And getting back to, okay, let's get to the point where we can do some real problem solving. So I think the two pieces are making sure that you know you're ready for that. You're ready for the unexpected. And so you aren't so flustered when it doesn't go perfectly to plan. But two, having a plan for how to deal with it in the sense of how do you deal with your own emotional state?

[00:12:23] Paul: How do you calm yourself back down so that you can take advantage of all of the planning you've actually done around this point? I mean, this goes to the famous quote from Eisenhower, right, who said, plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. Because all of the work that you've done to build your plan to get to that point actually gives you a ton of context and for solving things in the moment, you are actually really well informed, but you have to be smart enough to access it.

[00:12:52] Paul: You have to be calm enough, you have to be in that spot where you can take advantage of all the work that you've done. Because, you know, oh, because I laid all of these things out. I know that there's three fire extinguishers down this hallway. Or I know that actually there's a backup bathroom over here.

[00:13:07] Paul: Because when we were laying out this, I, I noticed that, or Oh, I noticed that we actually have some redundant servers that we could move this thing onto. And we're talking about, things in the physical environment that can go wrong.

[00:13:19] Paul: But I think it's also important to keep track of things like these people might think this is a terrible idea, right? That there's a human element to the unexpected, and that's where being able to be calm and collected in order to engage in the relational space with those people is even more important.

[00:13:40] Karen: Yeah. And I just wanna name that if you've done all these things that we've said, you planned really thoroughly and well, you were super transparent. You made your list of things that might be likely to go wrong. You stayed calm for the thing that came wrong, that wasn't expected. 

Handling Multiple Failures

[00:13:56] Karen: There are enough things that could go wrong in any given situation that eventually anyone will become frazzled.

[00:14:03] Karen: Like it's not anything wrong with you if you get to that point. For me, it's almost never the first thing. That about the time that the third major thing doesn't go the way that I thought. And I'm kind of worked through my resiliency and like I can get to that frazzled moment. And you have to have a plan for that.

[00:14:20] Karen: And it, doesn't have to be a great plan, right? Like give great plans for like the first thing you think might go wrong. But you have to be willing, and I think Paul, you're like, definitely we should panic is one. Like you've practiced that. For me it's often, so we're gonna take a five minute break and when we get back, I'll have an idea.

[00:14:37] Karen: Like I just am very prepared to say that. Or, boy, this is where we are. Who else has an idea for where we should go? That's another one of my classic ones, especially when it's the human thing of we don't wanna do that, but to be very willing to be upfront about, Nope, this is not going the way I thought, and I am not in this moment on my feet clear about what we should do about it.

[00:15:01] Karen: So I'm gonna take some time, and maybe it's five minutes, maybe it's 10 minutes. Maybe it's, we're gonna break for lunch early and when we get back after lunch, I'll have a plan or whatever. So there's some sort of confidence and I'm not throwing you all to the wolves, but I can't tell you what's next.

[00:15:15] Karen: 'Cause I don't know yet. Like that's one of my coping mechanisms. And by the way, if it is gonna be, I'll see you after lunch. There's a fairly good chance that I go for a walk around the building by myself in quiet. Get myself reworked, get myself reset. Then dive into, okay, what are my options here?

[00:15:33] Karen: Where are the places we might go? That kind of thing. So you might be a meditator, you might like to do some yoga. You might need to go for a run if that's your thing, or whatever it is that works for you. But if you don't already know, like hopefully hearing this segment, you're like, oh, right. When I get frazzled, the things that calms me down is if you know the answer to that, great.

[00:15:53] Karen: Keep that front of mind. If you don't know the answer to that, I'd work on that. Because there's no amount of planning that protects us from some number of things going astray. And eventually you've worked through all your resilience and it's just inherent in the human condition that we get a little panicky.

[00:16:13] Karen: So then what?

[00:16:15] Paul: It connects to something that we talked about, I don't know, maybe a few years ago. At this point when we talk about sort of when you're on the hook for something, 'cause that's really what we're talking about here, is you're in a situation where you are accountable in some way for this event, this project, this initiative, this meal, like whatever it is.

[00:16:32] Paul: Like you're on the hook in some ways. You have some accountability around that that naturally leads you to be higher, strong, more anxious, more concerned, about things when they don't go well because you're invested in making sure that they do go well. But it also means you're in a role and in a position where when you get anxious and you get stressed, if you don't have a way of dealing with that, you are going to be an amplifier and you're gonna give that to everybody else who's around you.

[00:17:00] Paul: And that is exactly what you don't wanna do. So your, you know, your point about like being able to have the practice to ground that out is really important. Because if you can stay calm and grounded when things start to go sideways, that actually gives everybody else around you a sense of calm as well.

[00:17:21] Paul: That can also be contagious. Right? I've sometimes heard this described as the difference between controlling things and having things under control. You're like, look, I'm not, I can't control what's going on, but I've got this under control. I don't know exactly what we're gonna do yet, but by the time we get to the 15 minute break.

[00:17:39] Paul: We will know what we're gonna do 'cause we'll figure it out, we'll get there. Being able to project that kind of confidence, of aura, is really helpful. Particularly when other people have noticed that things have tried to go sideways.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[00:17:54] Karen: So we started this episode with what could go wrong. And we think it's useful to ask that question, and also to know that you're never gonna have the complete answer. There is no such thing as knowing all the things that could go wrong. But we're proposing that, you know, the first step in this is do really detailed planning and then share that planning, be really transparent about it so that everybody who might be able to solve problems as they come up has the information that they'd need to know to do that.

[00:18:23] Karen: And then do an exercise around what are the things that these kinds of events or these kinds of projects, or these kinds of experiences likely have. So if you haven't done this before, talk to someone who has and brainstorm what are the things that are most likely to go wrong. And have a plan for those things.

[00:18:40] Karen: And maybe that even means you adapt your plan to begin with, to build a little more resiliency into it for the things that are most likely to go wrong if we're in the event space, timing is a huge one. Anything to do with transitions, meals, those kinds of things. Project spaces, timing, still resources, those kinds of things.

[00:18:58] Karen: And you're probably in charge of it because you have some expertise that you can predict that, but you wanna go through the exercise of predicting it. And then the next layer is expect that something can happen that you didn't expect, and be prepared to sort of roll with that, have a way to be grounded, have a way to be still present and with it.

[00:19:18] Karen: And then the next layer beyond that is when more things go wrong, then you can just stay steady through. Have a way to reground yourself, have an exit strategy to say, okay, I'm gonna give myself what I need to get back to where I can do what I need to do for this project in a way that is calm, in a way that projects confidence, that doesn't drag everybody else into your panic, but that acknowledges, yep.

[00:19:47] Karen: You see things aren't going the way we thought they are not going the way we thought. And I'm gonna deal with that if it's my job to deal with it, or we'll figure out who will or whatever. So that even on the days that more than the usual amount of unexpected things happen, you still have a way to be successful, to stay in relationship, to stay in connection with your group so that you can make the best of whatever situation you're in. 

[00:20:12] Paul: Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:20:15] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.