"By failing to prepare...
…you are preparing to fail”. Benjamin Franklin’s words may be 250 years old but remain contemporary, which is why today’s post is on the importance of planning. Rather than write a long and tedious post about some funky project already done in the past, I’m going to write a tale about planning in progress. If you like it, I’ll post updates to it in future, so please let me know if you do. That way we can judge whether the plan worked or not. It can become a live case study if you will. Walking the walk, as well as talking the talk, literally as you’ll see why in a minute.
Now I’m pretty fond of writing in an analogous fashion, so this post is going to use a personal tale as its simile. If you’re an advocate that Linkedin should only be used for strictly business only based reading, you better change channel right now.
Still reading? OK, so let’s talk planning. I’ve decided to take a bit of a wild adventure next year, something that will be equally uncomfortable and exhilarating, an impossible project. Whilst I’m not quite as exciting or extreme as my esteemed peer Duncan Eadie in adventuring (and he has some great stories), I can still just about manage to walk up and down the odd mountain.
So, I’m looking at this as a project and starting some planning.
Desired OUTCOME:
What it is that I want? What is it in service of?
- Experience the wilderness of the Highlands
- Spend some time with nature
- Push myself to do something different
- Take on a tough physical challenge
This translates into some form of SCOPE:
My first plan is to walk, end-to-end, the Affric Kintail Way in the Highlands
- 4 days wilderness walking
- 4 nights wild camping
- 44 miles distance, 1,800m of ascent
Sounds great so far? It did, until project scope started to creak just like my rusty knees. I wanted to push it a bit more. Fortunately I’m working this iteratively and in an agile fashion, so I’m happy to embrace change at this stage; far better than walking into a waterfall!
Which means CHANGE CONTROL:
- The walk needs to be longer
- It would be nice to extend the stay to a week
- You can’t walk in the Highlands and not "do" a mountain (so 2 mountain ranges added to the route)
Now it’s sounding a lot more exciting, but also a tad dangerous? Good management balances carefully risk and reward.
Oh, I also omitted to mention earlier that I’m doing this in February next year; might as well enjoy it as a proper winter walk.
Which also means I inherit the following RISKS:
- Inclement weather; rain, snow and gales could all be showstoppers
- Equipment failure is always possible in extreme conditions
- Avalanche; any snow pack may start to become unstable at that time of the year
- Emergency contact near impossible; no mobile signal in the remotest part of the UK
- Personal accident
- Have you ever tried to navigate on a mountain in a whiteout?
Not to mention a whole bag of ISSUES:
- Overly ambitious scope: is 100 miles, 13 peaks, 10 Munros, 7,000m ascent profile in 7 days even possible for me?
- I’ve never done long distance walking carrying a 23kg pack
- Last time I camped out was at a summer music festival
- It’s been 25 years since I last used an ice axe and crampons
- My current kit list is longer that an inventory of Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection
- I’m current an unfit dollop and need to shed the same amount weight as I need to carry
- I’m the wrong side of 40
- Polyarteritis Nodosa has left me partly paralysed below the knees in both legs and my left hand
So there you have it, some semblance of a plan. With lots to still do; a proper route plan, stop over points suitable for camping, and escape routes from mountains. Dates need to be flexible to accommodate weather patterns. I need to do everything I can to get fit. Walk more hills. Get miles in the legs, and start walking carrying weight. Practice self-arrest techniques. Run equipment trials and constantly evaluate, honestly, my capability to achieve this, and revise scope accordingly.
How do I relate this back to work? The simplest thing I should do now is to scrap this all off as a bad idea, a physically impossible dream too difficult to achieve. For me the consequences of failing to prepare could be pretty significant or at the very least mean a cold and washed out first night failure in an empty Highlands Glen.
Every night I fall asleep buried under an Ordnance Survey map, with the words of George Eliot reminding me “It is never too late to be what you might have been”.