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Bill @ MindPrep

MindPrep 156 – The Future Favors a Prepared Mind

Published over 2 years ago • 3 min read

Wow! What a roller coaster we’ve been living!

2019 – Everything is (kind of) going accord to plan.

2020 – The world went Covid-crazy.

2021 Q1 and Q2 – “Let’s find the new normal.”

2021 Q3 – Oops! The new normal has been put on hold.

It would be nice if we could turn to our elders and find sage advice. After all, my mother lived in Europe during the First World War, was abandoned by her husband (not my dad) at the height of the Depression and watched her fiancé (my day) march off to WW II. She could give me some advice about tough times.

But she is long-gone, and I have to figure this out on my own. After all, I’m now an elder. The problem is that I can’t fall back on past experience, and neither can you. So, we’ll just have to figure this out on our own.

This newsletter is the beginning of a MindPrep series focused on dealing with the future. Our position is that the future favors a prepared mind. We’ve made it here because our elders went down this road before. We can and will also think our way through this mess.

So, here are three opening thoughts.

It’s a Wicked World – deal with it

No, this is not a commentary on morality. It’s a commentary on working in a world without precedent. First, some simple explanations.

“Kind” environments have repeating patterns and feedback is accurate and rapid. Therefore, decision making can often improve with added experience. You can learn “the rules of the game” and become an expert by developing expert intuition. Examples of people in this environment range from chess masters to golf professionals to suburban firefighters to business strategists before 2020.

“Wicked” environments exist where the rules of the game are unclear, feedback is spotty at best, and patterns are lacking or not obvious. Expertise-based thinking may be helpful or, more likely, may lead you astray because it is based on a past that is no longer relevant and will likely not return.

Planning and decision making in this environment is anything but routine and intuition must be challenged. This is the environment we are living in right now with the pandemic. The “new normal” is and will be very wicked.

Wicked! Now what?

Look at this from a military perspective – it’s analogous to being caught in an ambush. Standing still is not an option but there is no set of rules to tell you which way to move. Left? Right? Forward? Back?

You have to choose, and you don’t have a lot of time. It’s your responsibility, so don’t look for the talking heads to tell you what to do. They don’t know either (although they pretend to).

You have the responsibility to think and act.

It’s time to think like an explorer.

Throughout history explorers prepared for expeditions by understanding, as best they could, the conditions they were about to face and then went about improving the equipment they would use.

Early explorers to the South Pole knew that they needed warm clothing and lightweight (but strong) sleds, so they focused a lot of their efforts on improving their equipment. Sometimes explorers opted for maximum flexibility because they didn’t know how the conditions would change over time. Blankets can be used for warmth; they can also be used for shade.

The explorers’ reality is a world of known and unknown; and it calls for elegant flexibility.

Consider the most flexible equipment at your disposal – the ability to think and imagine new ways and new things.

Mistakes will be made. Pick yourself up and dust yourself off.

We’ve spent decades fine tuning our careers and business models. Efficiency was paramount and rewarded. We gave lip service to “innovation,” but punished experiments that didn’t provide rapid ROI.

But now its time to think and act using less time than you want. Wicked worlds keep morphing and doing so in novel ways.

For those of you who know me, you know that I’ve been running workshops for decades built on a simple cycle of Sense, Make Sense, Decide, and Act. I refer to this cycle as the Sense-Response Cycle (SRC) and admonish attendees to “keep up with the pace of change or become irrelevant.” But what was fast in 2019 is normal today. We have to run this cycle uncomfortably fast.

Don’t let perfect get in the way of good-enough progress. All of us will make mistakes. It’s the reality of a wicked world. Deal with them and keep moving. We don’t have time to feel sorry for ourselves.

Remember, the future favors a prepared mind. And preparing your mind is a never-ending responsibility.

Next

The next couple of newsletters will focus on understanding the future and ways of dealing with it.

Bill

Bill @ MindPrep

Bill Welter

Four careers over 50+ years. USMC, engineering, consulting, education. Past twenty years have focused on helping leaders become and remain relevant during times of change.

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